Subnautica: The Truth
by Subnautical
Summary: The story of the sole survivor of the Aurora and his struggle for survival against all odds. Please read ALL the chapters, not just those that sound cool! (The Duel) I try to make each part 700 words (with a few exceptions). Don't forget to favorite, follow, and drop a review if you have any input or want to voice your opinions about the story.
1. Awakening

The last thing I remembered was a dull pain in my head preceded by loud metal clanging and flashing lights. When I came to, I found myself in a dimly lit life pod, slowly rocking back and forth as if in an ocean. There was an electrical panel cover lying on the ground before me, with one corner being slightly bloody, and as I felt the area of my injury on my forehead, I found blood from a broad cut in my forehead, now dried up from clotting, down my face. *The panel must have gotten torn off upon launch and bounced around, eventually hitting me in the head.* I thought to myself. *But why did I need to evacuate in a life pod in the first place?* I was quickly distracted by the distinctive smell of fire and the sound of crackling electricity as the damaged electrical panel began sparking and started a fire from a flammable fluid, no doubt released due to damage sustained on the way down. I turned to the emergency fire extinguisher, but to my dismay, it was not in its holder near my seat like I'd hoped. I began searching frantically, hoping it wasn't over by the fire. I found it underneath the electrical panel cover, and quickly put out the fire, the chemicals in the spray neutralizing the flammable liquid's chemical volatility. Just when I got a moment of silence, a hug *SPLASH* sound was heard on the hull of the life pod. I went over the status screen, and found that systems were not in optimal condition, something I knew from the fact that there had been a fire.

The fabricator, which allowed me to craft tools and materials, still had power from the 3 high-tech self-recharging power cells built into the pod, but the wires providing power to the pod's built-in communications relay had been damaged on the way down, and the fire melted them, further worsening the chances of me getting the comms relay operational without advanced tools. I was on my own for now. The fact that the flotation devices had been activated confirmed my fears: I had landed in an ocean. I had landed in an ocean. An alien one, no doubt, considering my infernal luck. An analysis of the air and water confirmed that at least it was compatible with human physiology. The water was similar to saltwater back on earth, minus the rampant pollution, and the air was mainly oxygen, with smaller amounts of nitrogen and carbon dioxide. That meant that complex lifeforms could exist on this planet. A ventral surface scan with weak sonar pulses confirmed I was in a shallow area, and it was currently daytime according to the pod's topside daylight sensor. I grabbed my standard helmet and put on my wet suit, mentally preparing myself for what I would see outside my life pod. I climbed the ladder leading to the top of my hill-shaped, floating refuge, and what I saw, no amount of mental preparation could prepare me for. I looked around, not seeing anything but crystal-clear waters in most directions, but as I face east, I saw the ship I was originally aboard before the crash. The name on the side said Aurora, and the name seemed to jump-start my memory as I remembered that I was part of a marine biology study group en route to planet SN-26375, or Subnautica for short, in case any marine wildlife was discovered there and the company I worked for, Alterra Science, wanted someone to study said lifeforms. I knew from my time as a marine biology student that shallow areas tend to be safer as compared to the deeper parts of a body of water, so, rationally, these "Safe Shallows" should be a relatively safe place- as safe as an alien ocean can be, anyway.

As I observed the burning, groaning, creaking wreckage of the Aurora, my personal AI computer, Karen, came in on my earpiece to warn me of a potential threat. "Aurora quantum drive core destabilized. Detonation in t-minus... Ten. Nine. Eight. Seven. S-six. Five. F-f-four-our." Karen stuttered as the drive core's unstable electromagnetic field began scrambling Karen's ability to communicate with me. "T-t-t-three-ee. T-t-two. One. The whole world seemed to go silent as the drive core began to implode upon itself, drowning out all other sound with silence. Then, a huge shock-wave burst forth from the Aurora as it began exploding on a massive scale. The initial shock-wave pushed my pod back and stunned me, enough so that I didn't notice the oncoming wave heading straight for my pod. I heard it before I saw it, and even then, I still didn't have time to react, as I thought the sound of the wave was just me regaining my hearing after the blast deafened me.

I was knocked into the water, but only after being flung a couple dozen meters, landing in the deep, blue ocean, in wide open waters. I was vulnerable and exposed to any and all predators nearby, and I was about 10 meters below sea level, and as I looked around for danger, I saw none, and quickly activated the beacon on my life pod, which popped up on my HUD a second later. I began swimming as fast as I could, not daring to dip below the surface. I just kept on swimming back to my pod, making sure not to look at my surroundings so as to not scare myself. Once I got back to the pod, I took a breather and recovered from my terrifying ordeal before heading out to explore the ocean on my own terms. I decided to search for the emergency survival storage cache, not having paid attention in survival training the day they told us where to find it. My keen detective skills were rewarded when I popped open a bulkhead panel and found 2 nutrient blocks for nutrition, 2 disinfected water bottles, and 2 underwater flares. All helpful, but unless rescue teams came at night, the flares were less so.

Nonetheless, I exited the escape pod via the bottom access hatch, and saw a beautiful world full of bizarre, unique, and interesting life everywhere. The shallows were similar to a shallow coral reef back on Earth, with a mixture of colorful plants, tube-shaped corals, corals growing out of the sides of rock arches like shelves, and brightly colored fish all over. The kinds of fish on Subnautica were a mixed bag of weird, beautiful, unique, terrifying, creepy, and intriguing. The staple of the ecosystem that I noticed was a small fish, tear-shaped in form, with nothing but a circular body with a stout, powerful, muscular tadpole-like tail and a trigger-like fin on both the ventral and dorsal surfaces. The most prominent and fascinating feature of this fish was that the body was 90% occupied on both sides by a gigantic yellow-orange eye, and a small, cone-shaped beak for a mouth. One swam up to me as I took in the scenery around me, and after inspecting me with its enormous, all-seeing eyes, it swam off happily, apparently satisfied with its observations of me.

An unusual and colorful mushroom caught my eye as the "Peeper", as I called it, swam away. The mushroom was purple, and grew in clusters. I noticed that some of them had patches of red in the center as well, but they weren't like usual mushrooms. It was concave, whereas Earth mushrooms were convex. The mushroom had some sort of liquid that made its outer edges swell, and as I tried to open one, acid poured out. If only I had copper, I could make a battery! I began to notice that there was metal salvage from the Aurora scattered all over the shallows, and grabbed a couple chunks to recycle into 8 titanium chunks back at my fabricator. As I set back out, I noticed that the shallows led into a kelp forest full of kelp that crept up towards the surface by intertwining with other stalks from the same seed. I dubbed them "Creepvines", and as I inspected the seeds, I realized that there was a chance that it was silica-based, due to it growing out of the sand at the ocean bottom, so I grabbed 2 seed pods to see if they could be used in the fabrication of silicone, and as I plopped the seed pods down on the fabricator table, scans revealed that my theory was correct, and the seeds were disassembled at a molecular level and reconstituted as one standard-size silicone rubber mat. I now had a means to rebuild.


	2. Getting Started

The silicone was useful for making grips for tools, as well as diving equipment, since it was 100% water-proof. I combined a mat of silicone with a piece of titanium to make a survival knife, and Karen explained the importance of the knife to human survival. As I set out exploring with my new tool, I spotted odd, bumpy outcrops of limestone in the shallows, and, tapping them with my knife, I discovered that they were actually hollow and breakable. I used the pommel of my knife to break a limestone outcropping open, and a chunk of copper fell out, and as I went around breaking more, I gained some extra titanium as well, while also gathering the occasional copper chunk. I returned to the pod and combined a piece of copper with 2 acid mushrooms, and was rewarded with a crude battery!

Now my life was getting somewhere, and I combined two titanium and one battery to make my own personal scanner. I knew it would be crucial to my survival to be ale to scan resources, plants, and wildlife, as well as fragments of technology leftover from the crash, so that I could learn how to make them for myself. I cruised around the shallows, hoping for some kind of tech to scan, and I found a damaged fragment of a Seaglide, which I scanned quickly. The scan only completed 25% of the blueprint, and as I continued searching for more, I eventually finished the blueprint for a Seaglide, which was a handheld underwater turbine, in theory anyway. It allowed me to go much faster than usual, but it didn't protect me like a vehicle. I needed one copper wire which was two copper, one power cell, which was two batteries and a silicone mat, a wiring kit, which was two silver, a resource I could get from the sandstone outcroppings in the kelp forest, and 2 titanium chunks. As I approached the kelp forest, I heard intimidating snarls all around, but never saw anything. Nevertheless, I got two silver chunks and high-tailed it out of there at top speed.

The next day, I resumed making materials for my Seaglide, and this time, the local wildlife seemed much more curious about my appearance in their environment. The previous day, any and all lifeforms seemed to be nowhere to be found, undoubtedly due to the fact that there was a massive ship crash not far from their home. As I swam around collecting mushrooms and copper for a power cell, Peepers decided to join me as I swam around the Safe Shallows. They didn't seem to like going near the Creepvine Forest, however, so whenever I went near the shallows' border, they turned back. I grabbed the last of the materials I needed for my Seaglide when I grabbed 2 Creepvine seed clusters, and I combined my resources to make a Seaglide, which, despite having a power cell inside, runs on batteries. It was actually for fast-tracking power, meaning it would burn through batteries at an alarming rate. It certainly helped, however, and I mustered the courage to venture deep into the Creepvine Forest.

I was eventually confronted when a loud hiss came from behind me as I scanned a new fish species, which I called a Hoverfish. The Hoverfish had six leg-like appendages, with transparent, circular fins on the end of each one, almost like little feet. They created an inertia-less field around the Hoverfish, allowing it to glide along indefinitely once it started moving in a given direction, and the field could be turned off at will. However, whatever confronted me wasn't interested in Hoverfish offender was an 8-foot long, barracuda-like predator. It had 3-foot long jaws, with large interlocking teeth and vertical indigo stripes along its body. I had caught a Peeper earlier, and the "Stalker", named for its stealth, stopped collecting metal to try and eat it out of my hand. It brought me some metal, but soon forgot about my generous actions a few minutes later. I theorized that multiple feedings would have more long-term effect on him. I went out and caught a few Hoverfish, hoping the Stalker liked to eat them. I tracked him down and pulled out the first Hoverfish. I held it out to him, eyes closed, not knowing which of us it would devour, knowing that he could just as easily attack me instead of eating the Hoverfish.


	3. A New Friend

There was a crunching sound as the Stalker accepted the Hoverfish from my hand, thankfully making sure not to bite the hand that feeds it, literally. As I pulled out another fish, the Stalker seemed delighted, and upon presenting him with a 3rd one, he was very exuberant with me. He brought me back 3 scrap metal pieces, but instead of becoming indifferent towards me, he began following me around, much like a barracuda would back on Earth, simply curious as to what I was doing. I pulled out another fish, but apparently he wasn't hungry, since he didn't take it out of my hand. I theorized that I could further strengthen the bond by helping him collect scrap metal, and when I returned to his den with two scraps of metal, he swam around me in a circle happily, obviously pleased with my efforts to assist him. He even rubbed up against me whenever he was hungry, doing it gently to not injure me.

I decided to name him Stanley, but I soon realized that it might be too soon for names. The true test of our relationship would be how he reacted at night, since nighttime seemed to bring out the predator in Stalkers. Other Stalkers were not so friendly towards me when Stanley wasn't around, but when he was, as long as I kept my distance, they didn't seem to mind my presence. Sometimes, even when Stanley wasn't around, another Stalker would quietly swim up behind me to investigate what I was doing, but I didn't really mind, as long as they didn't try anything fishy.

One day, Stanley found a mate, and I realized he needed his privacy for what he was about to do. I went off to find some Creepvine seed clusters to make silicone, since I wanted to get some fins so I could swim faster and keep up with Stanley and his pals. A few hours and a pair of flippers later, I heard a hiss behind me, and Stanley playfully ran into me, and I grabbed onto one of his dorsal fins to get a ride to wherever he was headed. I soon began dreading the answer to that query as we approached the kelp forest's edge. As Stanley and I approached the edge of the kelp forest, it opened up to a huge grassy plain, covered in red grass and rolling sand hills. There were canyons scattered throughout the deeper parts, but Stanley didn't seem too eager to explore outside of his forest. I soon learned why as Stanley timidly continued onward, and as we swam over a sand patch that was being dug around in, a large, flounder-like predator ambushed us from below. Stanley barely dodged the attack, and once the creature saw Stanley, it quickly left us alone. I scanned it from a safe distance, and name it "Sandshark", due to the dorsal fin on its head that stuck up just barely out of the sand as it dug around in the substrate, like a shark sneaking up on unsuspecting prey with expert stealthiness. Its natural prey, known as the "Spadefish", was shaped like a spade head, with one over-developed eye on the top of its head, and a wide mouth with flat, crushing teeth for mollusks and crustaceans. It had special sensory organs on its ventral surface to detect motion beneath it as it dug around in the substrate.

The Sandshark had a way to counter its sensory organs, by simply sitting very still at the bottom and only moving when necessary or desperate. Sandsharks weren't as smart as Stalkers, relying purely on natural instinct to dictate their behavior. Their capacity for learning was almost non-existent, being too stupid and too forgetful to remember much of anything. Even when they attack prey that bites back or tastes bad or is even poisonous, they still tend to make the same mistake more than twice. We heard a loud, whale-like moan reverberating throughout the water, and Stanley turned around and swam back to the forest, wanting nothing more to do with that place. When we returned to his den, I saw that Stanley had an egg sitting in his den!

As I approached the egg, Stanley growled with caution, but I slowly reached out and touched his snout, reassuring him that I meant no harm to his precious egg. I slowly approached the egg, being sure to be gentle with it, and I pulled out my scanner under Stanley's watchful eye, with him constantly watching my every move. I scanned the egg, and Stanley didn't mind, having seen me scan many things before, knowing that it was harmless. There was almost no info on Stalker eggs from inferences that Karen could make, so she added new info to the database, and also added info on Stalker taming as an addendum to the existing data. The next day, I scanned it again, and Karen determined that at the rate of growth it was exhibiting at this stage, the egg would hatch in about 4 days. 5 days after being laid, the egg was ready to hatch already! I hadn't even thought about my own personal needs recently, focusing mostly on Stanley and his family behavior. I named his mate Stella, and she quickly accepted me as an honorary family member, and it helped when I fed her a few fish as well.

The next day, Stanley and Stella went off hunting, and I was left to watch the egg, since there were a few creatures that would attack it if left unguarded. One was called a "Bleeder", being a parasitical leech-like pest, with 4 tentacles that wrap around its victims as it plunged its 4 tooth-tipped mandibles into the flesh of its host and sucked its blood up into a large sac on its abdomen. I had caught 3 of them trying to slowly and stealthily work their way towards the egg, hoping to suck the juices out of the nutrient-filled amniotic fluid sac that provided the embryo with much-needed nourishment. I stabbed at them with my knife, slashing their abdomens if I couldn't kill them, so that they could never digest meals ever again, but fighting off the Bleeders had created a lot of blood in the water, most of it being Stalker blood the Bleeders had in their sacs from previous meals. I soon learned that Stalkers weren't exactly the apex predators as a new, terrifying creature made its way to my location, having picked up the scent of Stalker blood.


	4. Diablo

I heard the new predator approaching as the sun began to set, and the sound made me wish the Aurora explosion had permanently deafened me. It sounded like a vengeful, bloodthirsty demon straight from the depths of hell, screeching and shrieking, every scream getting slightly louder and louder as the monstrosity approached. It was pitch-black in the middle of the night now, and the battle cry of the unseen predator was louder than ever. All the fish in the area began scattering at once, not wanting to meet the wicked thing that this way came. I should've grabbed the egg and swam away at top speed when I could, but I was too afraid that the creature that was hunting me would be waiting for me as soon as I turned around to escape. Terrified, I turned on my flashlight, but, fumbling with it due to having a knife in one hand, I dropped it and it sank to the ocean floor by my feet. Without a light, I knew I really had no way of warding off the creature if it threatened me.

All I had was my survival knife, and I clumsily fumbled for the flashlight, putting me at an even greater disadvantage if my enemy decided to attack before I could recover from dropping the flashlight. As I picked it up, I heard a low roar in front of me, off to my left. I slowly lifted my head to confront the creature, and all I saw was 2 angry, glowing blue eyes peering back at me from the veil of darkness that seemed to cover the entire ocean around me. I raised my flashlight, cutting a slash of light through the blackness, and it didn't seem to scare the creature at all. If anything, it pissed it off. The creature was anywhere from 10 to 12 feet long, and all down its back it had bony plates of thick, overlapping armor, and its head seemed to be that of a dragon of legend, albeit plated equally as heavily as the rest of its body. The jaw and teeth were fused together in forward facing teeth, which degraded to straight teeth towards the back of it jaw. The entire creature was built to kill. Despite being faced with imminent death, my overactive brain still managed to come up with an appropriate name for this new horror from the deep: Boneshark. It seemed too simple at first, but it described it perfectly. It was a highly predatory shark covered in bony armored plating. It was built to kill without being killed.

I quickly analyzed the creature with my keen observational skills, and realized that its bulky armored plating implied that it wasn't very agile or flexible, and somewhat more sluggish than a Stalker. My analysis skills ending up saving my life when I was able to predict his opening attack, which was a straight charge, and, having a horizontal tail, the Boneshark's best bet for lining up another attack would be rotating towards the surface after I panicked and scrambled for the surface. Instead, I dodged to the side and countered by scratching at its right eye, one of the only exposed places on its body. The Boneshark, not seeing any wounded or dead Stalkers to feast upon, and upon receiving a fresh wound courtesy of my blade, realized that there was nothing to be gained from prolonging this fight any longer.

I quickly pulled out my scanner as he shook off the pain from the wound I gave him, before retreating. Whereas Stalker were a yellow, or medium, threat level, Bonesharks were high, being orange and almost to the red danger zone. I had a feeling that the Boneshark I encountered would cross paths with me once again some day, and I dubbed him Diablo due to the fact that he reminded me of the devil himself. Stanley and Stella returned later to see me doing a one thousand yard stare into the Grassy Plains, and he nudged me, obviously worried that something was not okay with me. The encounter with Diablo had affected me pretty profoundly, and when Stanley smelled the blood from his wound near his lair, he quickly swam over to check on his egg. Seeing it was safe, he brought me some metal salvage chunks as a reward for my services. I was exhausted, and I swam back to my life pod for a nice, long nap.


	5. The Nuisance

After a nice, long nap, I decided it was time to get working on a more durable and energy-efficient mode of transportation. In my travels around the shallows, I'd scanned enough partial fragments of wrecked Seamoths to complete the blueprint to allow me to make one, but I still needed to find fragments for the Mobile Vehicle Bay, which was a buoyant vehicle constructor. I'd need to find 3 more fragments to complete the blueprint, and I found 2 with minimal effort, but the third was nowhere near as easy to obtain. I found that the last fragment that I required had sunk down into cave, which wasn't too alarming, except there was some sort of rock-like life form near the mouth of the cave, and upon approaching it, 4 flaps opened up Alien-style, revealing a puffer fish-like creature inside, which began chattering and buzzing, most likely a warning based on its tone, and as I slowly approached closer to it, the chattering and cautious buzzing turned to angry buzzing and almost snarl-like chattering, and, not being intimidated by a small buzzing rock-thing, I swam past it, which was a serious mistake, as I learned as the creature launched itself out of its "home" at high speed, buzzing furiously, swimming after me like a heat-seeking underwater bee. I tried to swim away from it, but the initial launch gave the critter the necessary head-start on me that it needed to catch up with me.

As the creature hit me in the back, its body swelled as two sacs in its torso inflated with liquid, finally popping the barrier between the two with a sickening *SNAP*, and as the barrier between the two chambers was ripped open, the 2 chemicals within combined to create a chemical reaction that caused the morbid little critter to self-detonate violently, leaving a large and painful bruise where the creature had impacted, and drawing blood around the area. Once the pain began to subside and the bleeding stopped, I investigated the malevolent creature's living "home". The fiendish, self-destructive little pest's home was quite intriguing, with a unique symbiotic relationship with its inhabitant, which I dubbed a "Crash", due to the fact that its main defense mechanism was to launch itself at high speed towards predators, crashing into them and blowing themselves up upon contact with a hard surface.

The Crash home grew similarly to a regular plant, taking nutrients from the substrate it grew in, but it had no way to fertilize with other homes to spawn, so, in a miracle of evolution, it developed four flaps around it hollow center chamber, allowing the actual Crash creature to take shelter inside the home. The Crash itself had an organ in its abdomen that absorbed nutrients that the Crash home produced, and in return, the Crash protected the home with its life. This may seem a bit unfair for the Crash, but its only true functions were to protect the home and carry spores to other Crash homes once the old one died off. After crashes launched to protect their homes, a new Crash would take its place to capitalize upon the home's offer of free nutrients, therefore spreading spores leftover from their previous home to a new plant entirely. The next time the Crash left the newly fertilized home, the home would grow a new Crash from one of the fertilized spores, and the cycle continued.

Every once in a while, I came across a Crash home with excess nutrients in its home, and after triggering the Crash self-defense system, I'd grab the powdery substance for later. This "Crash powder" was quite versatile, from being able to be fabricated into nutrient blocks to being full of enough minerals to actually be flammable, which was a key component in welders and flares when other materials were unavailable. After sufficient scans and observations, I moved on and scanned the final MVB fragment, completing the blueprint. I set out to make the Mobile Vehicle Bay, using resources I'd suspected I would need for it to make short work of the search. I already obtained the Seamoth blueprint beforehand, and planned accordingly, having collected all the necessary materials for its construction before going out to search for MVB fragments. Once I was done refining and combining all the necessary materials for the MVB, I exited my pod and released it from my hands. It floated to the surface after deploying its four flotation devices, and I climbed up to the command console and opened up the Submersibles menu. The Seamoth icon was in full color, indicating that the resources I'd beamed into the transmatter material transmitter were enough to construct a Seamoth.

I selected the icon, tapping it firmly, and four hovering constructor bots projected a holographic blueprint a couple meters in the air in front of the MVB, and began filling in the hologram with the necessary resources beamed to each of them from the material transmitter, using the same technology as the fabricator to rearrange the molecules of certain materials to fit them into any shape or size. As the Seamoth was completed, the Mobile Vehicle Bay released its stasis hold on the finished product and let it gracefully splash down into the water unharmed. I climbed in excitedly, and once I got safely inside, Karen stated "All systems online." My Seamoth was raring to go! I slowly pushed the throttle forward, and the Seamoth began cruising along, quickly increasing in velocity and speeding forward within seconds. I decided to pay a visit to Stanley and Stella, and Stanley tried to gnaw on my Seamoth's antenna until I got out and bopped him on the snout, indicating that he wasn't supposed to do that. He learned quickly, only requiring one more bop on the nose before he ceased trying to chew up my Seamoth for good. Now if only I had a place to dock it...

I decided it was time to create a long-term, if not permanent base, and I chose a flat area that gradually led up a steep hill that flattened into a plateau at the top to build it on. The central hub of my base was 3 modular rooms stacked on top of each other starting at the bottom of the 2-story tall hill, and the top floor led to a corridor that took me to a 4th modular room that was neatly placed on top of the plateau at the top of the hill. Then, the flat area where the central hub was located actually dropped off into a 50-meter-deep chasm below that separated the Creepvine Forest and Grassy Plains, so after adding a 5th modular room at the edge of the flat area, I left an opening for a Moonpool to be annexed onto the middle module of the room, so that it would overlook the deep chasm below. Now the only problem was finding Moonpool fragments- not an easy task.

According to life pod camera footage of the Aurora's debris scattering across the ocean, the Moonpool materials landed in a very deep part of the ocean beyond the plains I called the Grand Reef, due its epic vistas and sense of grandiose beauty, with entire coral reefs covering the walls of steep drops, and giant, glowing, turquoise, floating ball plants being held down by their roots, which wrapped around the top of the ball to keep it from floating off. One peculiar flora species that was unique to the Grand Reef was an odd, tree-like plant that looked fairly normal, until you saw where the leaves and branches were supposed to be. Instead, there was a translucent, pinkish membrane that resembled a see-through brain. Inside were many little plants and branches, some even looking like veins, making it look like a brain.

My theory was that this "Membrain Tree", as I dubbed it, allowed small, delicate plants to grow inside of it and protected them from harmful substances in the water by using its membrane to filter them out, converting them into nutrients through a complex anaerobic process. Scans confirmed my theories, and all these fascinating discoveries made me forget about my Seamoth's crush depth. "Warning! Maximum crush depth reached! Advise ascending immediately!" Karen blared as the glass began to crack and the hull began to groan and crumple under the pressure.


	6. Moonpool Discovery

As the hull and windshield began to be crushed by the pressure of the ocean above me, sirens were blaring, red lights flashing in distress, and I pulled up hard on the throttle, ascending immediately to a safe depth. My HUD indicated that the Seamoth's hull integrity was at 87%, which wasn't too bad, but still worrisome. The unfortunate thing about the maximum crush depth was that I saw a Moonpool fragment just beyond the max depth, and that's why I was descending. I had to now go out there myself, which was super-dangerous, and thankfully, my dive suit was pressurized to counter the effects of water pressure. Still, my air supply went down twice as fast down there without a rebreather, something I sorely lacked.

With thirty seconds left of air, I pulled out my Seaglide and went full throttle towards the Moonpool fragment. As I reached it and began scanning it, I noticed that I only had 15 seconds left. As I finished the scan, Karen warned me I only had 10 seconds of oxygen remaining. I pulled out my Seaglide and made a beeline for my Seamoth. 9. Stupid. 8. Should've waited. 7. Should've refilled my tanks. 6. Go. 5. GO. 4. My Seaglide dies. 3. I'm pretty sure I'll die. 2. Almost there! 1. Things start to go fuzzy. 0. Everything goes black as I open the Seamoth hatch. I wake up a minute later, gasping for air, lucky to be alive. I take big gulps of air, regaining my composure, and just when I think I'm safe, I hear an unholy roar. "Warning. Massive heat signature detected. Advise immediate vacating of the area." Karen warns me. The roar was closer next time, echoing throughout the reef. I gunned the Seamoth up to full speed, not wanting to meet whatever made that sound. The third roar shook the entire reef, and made my bones rattle, seemingly reverberating through to my very soul. I pushed the Seamoth to its limit, going faster than ever back to my base.

At least I had gotten all the Moonpool fragments I needed. Whatever that monstrosity was, as long as I didn't go to the Grand Reef at night, I didn't have to worry about it. The Moonpool was a pretty crucial part of my survival efforts, being able to charge my Seamoth's power cell, and, using a built-in fabricator, could also craft upgrade modules, four of which could fit into my Seamoth at once. The most important one was the pressure compensator, which reinforced the hull to allow the Seamoth's crush depth to be 200 meters deeper per upgrade module. That means I was able to descend to 1,000 meters deep if I put all my resources into pressure compensator modules. However, with myriad other modules available, the thought of going purely for pressure compensators was nonsense in my mind! There were solar chargers, electrical perimeter defense systems, torpedo systems, power efficiency modules, hull reinforcements, sonar systems, and storage containers all available for implementation on the Seamoth. I decided I wanted one pressure compensator, one perimeter defense system, one sonar system, and one storage container all installed onto my Seamoth.

I realized that first, I needed an upgrade console, which I could also use to name my Seamoth, as well as paint it. I named it the USS Explorer, mainly because that's what it would be doing, and I painted it navy blue with yellow secondary colors. I began crafting all the necessary materials for the 4 modules, but found that I was unable to make the pressure compensator. It required a plasteel ingot, something I had not yet obtained, and the fabricator recipe showed that I would need lithium in crystalline form as well as a titanium ingot to make one. I had no idea where to find lithium, but as I recalled my biochemistry lessons from school, I remembered that large fungi often led to crystallized lithium forming near them.

The problem was, I didn't know where to find anything like that. I chose to search southeast and began travelling in that direction, knowing that there were large fungi formations nearby, having picked up heavy fungal residue on a Boneshark near the Grassy Plain's far edge.


	7. The Mushroom Forest

The trek to the southeast of my base went semi-parallel with the side of the wrecked Aurora, and I knew that eventually, I'd run into some pockets of radiation. Before the journey, I fed Stanley and Stella, scanning the egg one more time. It had 2 days until it hatched, and it pulsated and wiggled slightly, the baby Stalker inside being almost ready to come out. I then gathered some Creepvine seed pods to make silicone and lead from the Grand Reef's basalt outcroppings, and combined them to make a lead-lined radiation diving suit, which fit nicely over my basic wet suit. It also came with a helmet, almost identical to my default one in every way except for the material it was made of. It allowed me to go near the Aurora post-explosion without getting radiation poisoning, which was more than I could say for the wildlife near the Aurora's crash site.

I heard more unearthly roars when I ventured too close to the crash site, so I steered clear of it by a large margin, not wishing to ever have to confront whatever was making that noise. I eventually reached the edge of the Grassy Plains, which led to a large forest full of tree-like mushrooms, very large in size and having glowing orange photophores on the undersides of their "caps". I scanned them, and Karen said that they produced the correct biochemical compound required for the natural formation of crystallized lithium. As I began to search nearby for lithium crystals, I heard the unmistakable shriek of a Boneshark as one charged me from behind, jaws open wide, ready to rip my flesh and snap my bones in half. I quickly dodged to the side again, but didn't have my knife ready to counter-attack, and by the time I did, I turned around to meet and old nemesis. I looked the beast right in the eyes, and noticed a large, deep gash, partially healed, over its right eye.

It was Diablo, and this time, he wasn't going to swim off without a fight. He had learned from our previous encounter, and was much more confident this time. As Diablo circled me, planning a second attack, I circled him the opposite direction, seemingly rotating around a fixed point in between us, analyzing each other's strengths and weaknesses.

Diablo's strengths were his nigh-impenetrable armored shell, his crushing jaws, his ability to swim up or down very quickly, and his size. His weaknesses were not being able to turn left or right quickly, being slow due to his size and armor weighing him down, and his jaws not being very long, meaning he had to bite down just right to get my arm in between his jaws. He was used to either taking chunks out of a larger prey animal, or catching something in his jaws that was easy to get a hold of, such as a crustacean in its shell. His jaws came to a point, able to dig into a larger animals flesh, then chomp away for a few seconds and swim off, and their teeth being fused into the jaw itself made it perfect for cracking tough shells. It wasn't exactly designed to take on something over half its size, but still smaller than itself.

My strengths were my agility, my technology, my superior intelligence, my tactics, and my versatility. My weaknesses were my inferior size, my soft, vulnerable skin, my need for oxygen, my limited means of attack, and the fact that I was completely out of my element. All I had to attack with was my survival knife, whereas Diablo had an entire maw filled with razor-sharp, flesh-ripping, bone-crushing teeth. At least my limbs didn't fit very well in his jaws, making it more difficult to rip them off. My limited agility made it almost impossible to successfully charge him, so I waited for Diablo to make the opening move. He dashed towards me ferociously, and I charged forwards as well, catching him by the pectoral fins, holding him back, his snapping jaws just inches from my face.

I could feel every shock-wave of water as Diablo's jaws snapped shut right in front of my face. I needed to do something fast, before Diablo cracked my helmet or chomped my head off. I used my quick thinking and precise aim to swiftly pull back my knife and jab the blade between 2 bony plates in the left side of Diablo's neck, cutting deep into his flesh, drawing a small amount of blood. He realized that other carnivores would be attracted to the scent of his blood, but he was determined to end my life, so he quickly tried to dispatch me. In his haste, he made a few mistakes that cost him dearly, as I countered a quick lunge by slicing at his belly as I dodged below him. Tired and hurt, my nemesis was dazed, and I capitalized on this, grabbing his head and raising my blade to end his life.

But something felt wrong. I realized that I had invaded HIS territory, and that he was acting in self-defense. I looked into his scarred eye and no longer saw anger or hatred or ferocity. I saw genuine fear. I put my knife away reluctantly, acknowledging that I had to be more merciful than my foe to truly beat him. He never actually did anything to me, but my rage, built up from the loss of my fellow scientists during the Aurora's explosion, had been unleashed upon a creature that merely tried to defend its rightful territory. I released Diablo from my grasp, and, realizing that he would probably die without help, I felt deep regret for unleashing my fury upon him. I took a syringe from my medkit aboard the USS Explorer, filled it with a painkiller, and injected it into the wound on his belly, easing the pain. I then went out and caught a Spadefish, digging nearby for crustaceans, and quickly ended its life, preventing it from suffering. I brought it over to Diablo and carved a chunk out of it, tossing it to him gently. He weakly caught it and swallowed it whole, and I continued feeding him Spadefish chunks until the entire fish was gone. I bandaged up his neck wound with medicated bandage wraps, to keep it from getting infected. I realized that this creature was misunderstood and in need of rescue, so I decided that I needed to build a temporary refuge nearby.

I felt really bad about hurting Diablo so much, and I didn't want him to die, so I went back to my base and gathered a lot of titanium and glass, returning as quickly as I could. Diablo was now swimming around a little bit, which was a good sign, but he still needed help. I quickly constructed a foundation where I could operate on Diablo without worrying too much about sand or dirt getting in his wounds, and I pulled out my new welder, which I had fabricated while I was away. I moved him over to the foundation, and knew this going to hurt him- a LOT. I lifted the bandages on his neck, seeing that it was still bleeding a bit, and Karen's scans showed that he was losing blood fast. *Forgive me...* I silently pleaded as I pointed my hypobaric welder at the wound and pulled the trigger, lighting the flame. I had it on low power, but it still burned like hell. I began cauterizing the wound shut, and Diablo let out the loudest, most sickening scream of pain I've ever heard in my entire life. *C'mon, you stubborn bastard!* I thought to myself. *This is for your own good!*

I was almost done cauterizing the wound shut when I heard a small, hungry predator behind me. I turned around and was face-to-face with a new carnivore. It was fairly small, being only a couple feet in length, and strongly resembled a tadpole in it later stage of life. Its tail was identical, as well as its head, but it had 2 eyes on each side of its head, and an odd, over-developed fin protruding from its forehead. I finished cauterizing the wound and turned around to face the creature one-on-one, and as I brandished my knife, it opened its mouth to reveal large, curved teeth, meant for eviscerating prey and ripping the flesh off of much larger animals. A quick scan showed that its body was 96% percent muscle, indicating that it was an extremely strong and fast little predator, and its protruding fin had a glowing bulb at the end of it, like an angler fish, which housed sonar and bioelectricity sensors. This "Biter Fish", as I named it, was the ideal predator, even though it was a bit too small, because, as I soon learned as it let out a long, loud call, it didn't hunt alone. An entire SWARM of Biters converged on my location, obviously attracted to Diablo's blood. I had to think fast if either of us was to survive.

I had noticed the other day that Stalkers were especially sensitive to ultrasonic pulses, so I hit a button in my helmet that gave off a hypersonic pulse that traveled for miles underwater, hoping that Stanley and his friends heard the call and were curious enough to investigate. I heard a loud Stalker roar as they began swimming to my aid, but my hypersonic pulse had been heard by the Biters as well, and apparently that hypersonic pulse must've been what they pick up when they detect food, because they all bared their teeth, snarling and hissing in anticipation as their eyes glossed over in preparation for the meal before them. There were about 8 of them, maybe a bit more, and my knife slashes didn't seem to hurt them that much. Most of their veins were buried beneath their muscles, which were very dense and hard to cut through. Diablo wasn't in any shape to fight, but he still managed to chomp one Biter in half, but others converged on him to try and take him down.

As they closed in for the kill, Stanley charged in and caught the leader of the trio that was attacking Diablo in his jaws, crushing his mid-section and breaking his spine instantly. As Stella came charging in, she wasted no time going after another Biter that was attacking me, biting at my arm as I raised it up to shield my face and chest. After biting it in half, she quickly snapped up the pieces and ate the entire fish, and the other Biter Fish literally turned tail and swam off at top speed, obviously not willing to take on two Stalkers, a human, and a Boneshark. The Stalkers then turned towards Diablo, but I quickly swam to his rescue, getting in between him and the Stalkers, waving my arms in protest.

Diablo, realizing that I was protecting him, began to accept me as an acquaintance, but not necessarily a friend. After all, I did stab him in the neck and slashed at his belly, all after scratching at one of his eyes upon our first encounter. As I swam around the Mushroom Forest, however, I noticed him following me not too far behind, obviously curious as to what I was doing in his territory. He saw I was merely collecting some lithium and left me alone, realizing that I was doing him and his territory no harm. Every once in a while, I'd catch a fish and find Diablo, feeding it to him to strengthen the bond between us.

Over the next few hours, I fabricated a tracker/monitor that safely and harmlessly attached to wildlife, and I attached it to Diablo so I could keep an eye on him and his health. It was non-intrusive, and with his thick hide and armor, he almost never even knew it was there. I did the same with the Stalker family, and theirs subtly stuck to one of their dorsal fins via quick-drying, water-proof adhesive, which I had to apply when they surfaced in my Moonpool. I had even designed an egg monitor, but when I traveled to the den, Stanley and Stella were watching their egg intently, and I sped over with my Seaglide to see what was happening.


	8. The Egg

I approached Stanley's nest, noticing that the egg was pulsating erratically. It dawned on me that it wasn't pulsating- it was hatching! I watched as one of the many blister-shaped membranes on the outer shell of the egg began ripping and tearing as a small, pointed snout began poking its way out. Eventually, a baby Stalker wriggled its way out of the egg, and I swam back a bit, making sure not to make the baby imprint on me first, not wanting to become the Stalker's father figure. Stanley swam up to the miniature mirror-image, and nuzzled it gently. It was actually pretty decently sized, being over a foot in length, about a foot and a half to be exact. Stella was next, again, nuzzling it with her snout tenderly. They both moved away and turned towards me, and I swam over and pet the baby gently, and he nipped at my gloves. I was officially a part of the family.

Over the next few days, I bonded with the baby, with Stanley's approval of course, but at first it was only when he was with Stanley or Stella. I named the baby Steve after scanning it to confirm it was a "he", and taught Steve how to collect metal salvage, which was actually an important life process for Stalkers. Scans of their teeth showed that the titanium found in the scrap strengthened their tooth enamel when exposed to their teeth, and occasionally, a Stalker would lose a tooth while collecting metal. I grabbed Stalker teeth as souvenirs, and found that their enamel could be combined with glass to make enameled, pressure-resistant glass, useful for deep-sea vehicles and observatories.

I used some enameled glass to make observatories on either side of my Moonpool, overlooking the chasm below for a gorgeous view of the ocean in all its beauty. I used the lithium I collected from the Mushroom Forest to make a few plasteel ingots when combined with a titanium ingot. I then made a pressure compensator and installed it aboard the USS Explorer, alongside the other 3 modules. It was time to deeper. The USS Explorer was now ready for deep-seas exploration, up to 400 meters below sea level, and with a perimeter defense system, I was able to defend myself from potential predators by delivering a localized electric pulse at a voltage of my choosing.

If I was having a hard time navigating my way through a cave system, I could rely upon my sonar system to relay the terrain's layout back to my cockpit's HUD for increased path-finding capabilities. And my power efficiency module effectively micro-managed the USS Explorer's power usage to cut its power usage in half. I could now travel twice as far without needing a recharge! However, I stored this module in my brand new onboard storage module, and decided that I could swap out the power efficiency module and the sonar module as needed. For complex cave exploring or scouting a new area, I preferred the sonar module, but for open-ocean travel or just going far distances in general, I preferred the power efficiency module.

My initial discoveries of the "Grassy Plateaus", as I had named the inner portion of the Grassy Plains, had been most interesting, providing me with 3 separate Cyclops submarine fragments to scan, all three belonging to the hull. I now knew how to make the hull of a Cyclops, but I still needed the bridge and the engine. The engine was a little more challenging to find, requiring me to go to an area that I really didn't like travelling to: the Dunes. I named them this because just beyond the furthest reaches of the massive Grand Reef biome, after the "Sparse Reef" that was a harsh, scarce version of the Grand Reef, there was a vast, seemingly endless desert with huge, rolling hills, mountains even, of sand, with little to no life out there whatsoever.

I hated it there, because the roars of the massive creature I once heard near the Reef's edge were clearly audible, and out in the middle of nowhere, with no place to hide, I was a sitting duck for whatever monstrosity lurked nearby, just barely hidden out of my range of visibility.


	9. Leviathan, Part 1

I only went to the Dunes twice, and only once did I actually stay longer than I needed to, but THAT'S a story for later date. The first time I ventured into the barren wasteland beyond the Reef was to recover some Cyclops engine fragments. Karen pulled footage from the Aurora's external cameras once I got the communications relay in my life pod repaired, and she utilized her boosted functionality from being connected to the Aurora's network, which was housed in the bridge, the only section still online, to calculate the Cyclops' engine fragments impact site.

Karen then sent the coordinates to my PDA and linked the signal to my HUD, and I set out to find said engine fragments. I scanned them as quickly as I could, not wanting to spend any more time than necessary in monstrosity-infested waters. As I turned to leave for the final time, I used my sonar pulse to get an idea of how close I was to whatever creature was out there, and the sonar detected a massive anomaly about 10 meters past my maximum visibility, the creature being approximately 61 meters long. And while the sonar didn't pick up much detail, I could clearly see huge teeth in what seemed to be its massive jaws. Whatever it was, it definitely WASN'T a vegetarian. I gunned the Explorer back to home base ASAP, not wanting to become a sardine in a can for a real-life sea monster. That night, the creature's roars echoed in my dreams, until my "vision" went black and I "heard" it roar so loud it woke me up in real life. It's said that any sailor that had a mysterious black spot appear on his skin one day had been marked for death by Davy Jones, and that his leviathan would go after anyone who had the spot, dragging them down to Davy Jones' Locker forever. I looked down at my hands as I washed my face with desalinated water that morning, and noticed a black spot the size of a quarter on the back of my left hand. I ignored the superstition's instructions to get to dry land immediately. I should've followed them.

At first, I thought the sea monster only dwelled in the Dunes in the daytime, and ventured out to the Grand Reef at night. Little did I know he roamed in many more places. The leviathan traveled to a part of the Reef I dubbed "Danger Reef", for good reason, quite often. I didn't like going there anyway, so when I went cautiously exploring there and saw a massive, moving, 60-meter object on my sonar, I vowed to steer clear of the Danger Reef as much as possible. It's not like I enjoyed going there anyway. There were lots of Bonesharks in that area, and there was a central mound with huge, spiky rocks jutting out on all sides, coming to a point like spikes on a mace ball. They made me feel uneasy, and one screw-up could mean getting the USS Explorer impaled on one and having to abandon my Seamoth- over 200 meters below sea level. I'd never make it to the surface without a rebreather. Biter Fish were another threat in the Danger Reef, though being less deadly than Bonesharks, and more of a nuisance than a life-threatening predator. Nevertheless, I never underestimated Biters, and whenever they approached me, I used my electrical perimiter defense system to shock them quite a bit, driving them away for a long time. The more serious the shock, the longer affected animals would stay away from me if they survived.

Fortunately, the Danger Reef didn't really hold much in terms of value for me. However, I did find fragments of a terraformer there, which was a tool that functioned exactly as its title suggested: it moved the earth, or, more accurately, it moved the Subnautica. It allowed me to pick up and place any terrain of my choosing, terraforming my environment how I saw fit. It was useful for creating a secret cave near Stanley's den to store his metal salvage for safekeeping, and I also dug a large cave for my new Moonpool location. It was like having an underwater Batcave all to myself, with an entrance that led outside, not that it helped me against the leviathan. As the season on the planet shifted to summertime, the ocean temperatures fluctuated quite a bit as well, occasionally causing a large current to form near areas of varying temperatures. These currents were often made once-safe biomes treacherous to navigate in the USS Explorer, and it often took serious piloting skills and experience to keep it from being carried away on the current or smashed against a canyon wall. One particularly dangerous encounter took a turn for the worse when I lost control of the Explorer while in the Grand Reef biome right before sunset.

I was slammed into a black smoker and my head went flying it to a bulkhead as the Seamoth came to an abrupt stop upon collision. When I came to, it was pitch black out, literally nothing visible, and while the Seamoth wasn't compromised, it sure wasn't going anywhere for a little while, not without internal repairs. My situation took yet another turn, this time for the absolute worst, upon hearing the distant roar of my most feared opponent that I've never encountered. The roar was becoming louder and louder with each recital of the terrible sound of horror, and eventually, it seemed to stop. It was completely dark out by now, nighttime on the planet Subnautica, low power, 220 meters below, in the middle of an unexplored area. And now a potential super-predator could be right next to me and I wouldn't be able to see it.

I had turned off the Seamoth lights so preserve power, and as I reached for the switch to flick them back on, my hand was trembling, my pupils dilating, straining to see what I was faced with. Finally, my eyes made out a figure in the blackness. It was... A Spadefish. Attracted to the dim glow of my Seamoth's panels and HUD. I sighed in relief and went switch the lights on when a huge blur snapped up the Spadefish in a flash. Before I thought to not turn the lights on, I unconsciously did so. What I saw made me wish that I hadn't. All I saw was a huge, monstrous face filling up the entire windshield and beyond, with a large bulbous chin, a horn-like crest on its forehead, 2 blank eyes on either side of its face, with a huge, toothy maw with an underbite, blood from the unfortunate Spadefish still stuck in its teeth, each one the size of a small sword.

It had 4 odd, leg-like appendages on its face, 2 on each side, the points of each connecting joint forming a rectangle, and each appendage being multi-segmented and ending in a point, complete with gripping hairs for holding on to whatever the hell it felt like. As it stared intently at me, it felt as though a demon that even Satan himself rejected was staring straight into my soul, wishing to take it for its own. For a second, I thought it wasn't interested in me, but I was wrong. It used its 4 grappling appendages to grab on to my Seamoth and began shaking it back and forth violently to see if anything was actually in there. I grabbed on and tried to hold as still as possible. The terrible beast roared in frustration, shaking me down to my core. It only went downhill from there.


	10. Leviathan, Part 2

I thought things could only get better as the massive horror before me was shaking me and the USS Explorer back and forth, and he eventually realized that he wasn't getting anywhere. He stopped shaking me eventually, but just as I thought I was getting a break, the leviathan adjusted its grip on my Seamoth, moving his appendages further back and opening his mouth wide, attempting to shove the Explorer into his mouth. He began chomping down on the glass, trying to crack the glass open, and I had to think fast before he ripped the Explorer's canopy open. I readjusted myself to reach the Seamoth control panel, fumbling to hit the perimeter defense system, and I saw that my Seamoth power would only allow for one medium electrical pulse. I charged up the pulse, and as the whine of the electronics rose slowly, the glass began to crack as the leviathan's rage triggered his adrenaline, making him powerful enough to begin crushing the cockpit. I released the button, sending out an electrical shock-wave that caused the leviathan extreme pain.

It threw the Seamoth out of its mouth as it screamed in agony. It swam off roaring, but judging by its thick hide and large body mass, Karen estimated I had about 30 seconds until the leviathan returned, and I didn't have enough energy to shock him again. I scrambled out of my Seamoth, fumbling to open the external storage system, and quickly grabbed the power efficiency module. 20 seconds. I yanked the module installation panel open, desperately trying to remove the sonar module as quickly as possible. As soon as the sonar module was free and the module slot was open, I frantically shoved the power efficiency module in. 10 seconds. I got back into the USS Explorer as quickly as possible, and started the engine as I heard the unholy demon closing in on me once again. The power efficiency module took about 5 seconds to integrate with the Seamoth systems. "All systems online." the onboard computer chimed as the Seamoth engine started.

Before the onboard computer was even done announcing that the systems were online, I hit the accelerator and gunned it as fast as possible. I struggled getting it up to speed, and I was almost out of the Grand Reef when the leviathan caught my Seamoth with his mandibles. I quickly hit the electrical defense system for a minimum shock, and it was just enough to disorient the monster into releasing me. I had successfully escaped into the Grassy Plateaus, and I exited the Explorer to replace the power cell. As I finished connecting the power cell, I heard the loud, whale-like moan of the mystery creature of the Plains, and I feared the worst until I saw a huge, turtle shell-shaped creature with three long, trunk-like, flowing tentacles behind it, and a bioluminescent underside, with many downward-facing "eyes", all glowing neon green. The entire underside around it shell glowed electric blue in the dark ocean blackness. On its shell-like back, there were plants and corals growing on it like a miniature reef ecosystem, even complete with small fish such as Peepers and Boomerangs, which were C-shaped blue and yellow fish that had large, flat, coral-crushing teeth, and whose fin tips glowed a bright blue color.

I cautiously approached the majestic giant, and I scanned it the best I could. The creature's thick shell interfered with my ability to get readings on its internal organs, so most of what I had to go on was from external readings. I dubbed it a "Reefback", due to its unique dorsal surface, and I followed him in my Seamoth to observe its behavior. I was curious to see how it collected coral and flora on its back, and when the Reefback approached another of its species, they paired up for a while, swimming so close to each other that for a while, their shells were connected to each other, trading seeds, coral polyps, and lifeforms as the 2 Reefbacks' ecosystems mingled with each other. The fish weren't worried about being eaten, with Reefbacks being filter feeders. However, the fish on their backs *did* have to worry about other Reefbacks' dorsal inhabitants, since sometimes, Biter Fish were known to take over entire ecosystems, almost like underwater pirates, moving from Reefback to Reefback as they convened to mingle with others of their species. Biters preferred Reefbacks with bloodgrass growing on their backs, hiding among the crimson blades of grass until they were close enough to board an inhabited Reefback's shell.

When my Reefback, who I named Sancho, was approached by an apparently vacant Reefback with lush bloodgrass on its back, Biter fish emerged from the grass, jaws snapping and teeth gnashing, eager for an easy meal. I sped forward to confront them, the whine of my electrical defense system building up as I prepared to release an electrical pulse to repel the invaders. I released the button at 40% charge, causing extreme pain to the Biters' muscular bodies. Having lots of muscle meant lots of nerves, and as the electricity hit their nerves, it sent all the high-voltage electricity straight to their tiny brains, causing the worst pain imaginable. The Biters immediately swam off, not bothering to go back their "vessel", instead returning to the Grassy Plateaus they originated from.

As I returned to my base after a long journey around the surrounding ocean, I noticed a large, unusual cave opening in the middle of the Grassy Plateaus. Checking my Seamoth's power reserves, I saw I had 76% power, which was plenty for a little cave exploring. I switched out my power efficiency module for my sonar system, not daring to remove my perimeter defense system in case the environment below was hostile, and descended into the depths. As I dove into the mysterious cavern, I noticed a new resource node type adorning the walls of the unusual vertical tunnel. I peered down into the darkness, and saw a faint, pinkish glow coming from below. I ventured closer, my curiosity getting the better of me, not knowing what awaited me below.


	11. The Jellyshroom Caves

I descended into the mystery cave, not knowing what awaited me in the darkness below, the only thing visible down there a faint, pink glow. As the source of the glow came into view, it took my breath away. There were huge, glowing pink mushrooms, jelly-like, transluscent caps pulsing ever so slightly. They all had holes in the center, almost like a trunk on a tree. I noticed a couple of Bonesharks swimming around, minding their own business, so I did the same.

I saw a fish that was quite possibly related to Peepers, having a similar body shape with a large eye taking up a large percentage of their body. Their tail was different, however, being 3 odd tentacles, trailing behind it in a peculiar manner. Its body was more of a dark purple, as opposed to the Peeper's navy blue skin, and the large eyes were purple instead of yellow-orange, and the head lacked any sort of mouth. I named it an "Oculus", and scanned it to get more information.I couldn't find how it ingested food, but my theory was that it stuck near the "Jellyshrooms", the pink, hollow, gelatinous mushrooms, and fed off of the nutrients that were pushed out from the Jellyshroom's pulsating cap, which moved in a similar manner to a jellyfish back on Earth, pushing water away from it gently. The manure from the Oculus then fertilized the Jellyshrooms, helping them grow.

I soon discovered that the Oculus wasn't the only species that had a symbiotic relationship with the Jellyshrooms, as I approached one to explore the hollow inside. I approached the entrance in the center of the cap, and was greeted by a huge, eel-like creature that had been coiled up inside the trunk. The creature was pink with purple markings, with long, undulating fins down each side of its long, tapered body. Its mouth was odd, being a small slit with two canine-like teeth on the top and bottom, and coming from around it were two large, spindly mandibles, meant for grabbing prey as its teeth gnashed them to pieces, similar to a crab.

If I didn't act fast, I'd be the "Crabsnake's" next meal. I grabbed it by the mandibles and twisted one of them in a way that it wasn't supposed to twist, and the Crabsnake let me go almost immediately, swimming off and seeking refuge in another Jellyshroom in a different part of the "Jellyshroom Cave". I cautiously approached the Jellyshroom trunk opening, carefully peering in to make sure there were no other inhabitants, and saw a chunk of uranium inside. It wasn't big enough or radioactive enough to be dangerous, however, so I was okay holding it.

I honestly had no use for uranium as of right now, but I knew the Aurora had some miniature nuclear reactors onboard, and I figured that they must have landed somewhere, awaiting discovery. I set out to find said nuclear reactor once I was done in the Jellyshroom Caves, not knowing where to start searching. Judging by the location of the Cyclops engine parts, which were stored near the nuclear reactor parts, I checked in the deepest part of the Grand Reef. I switched out my power efficiency module on the Explorer for a second pressure compensator, increasing my crush depth to 600 meters below sea level.

I dived deeper than I ever have before, almost 500 meters below, and this time, I had crafted a computer chip and silicone, combining the two to make a rebreather that allowed me to use O2 units at a regular pace, regardless of depth. I descended into the deepest part of the Reef, flicking on my Seamoth headlights, illuminating the void before me, and a shimmer of metal on a small cliff caught my eye. I moved in for a closer look, and saw half a reactor, the uranium chamber cracked open and thankfully empty, and I scanned it, having Karen calculate where the other half landed. Further down, below the cliff by about 50 meters, was the other half of the nuclear reactor. I cautiously approached, well aware that the currents could easily sweep the USS Explorer into the nearby cliff, with me still inside. I traversed as close as I dared to the reactor fragment, not wanting to be swept up against the cliff face, especially since I was over 500 meters below the surface!

At that depth, the pressure could cause a minor leak to become a large hull breach within minutes. I swiftly exited my Seamoth, immediately pulling out my scanner, the lead lining in the reactor making it take quite a while to scan, and I began to sweat as the percentage counter narrowed in on 100, a bead of sweat running down my face as my scanner raced against time, desperately trying to finish the scan before a current swept the Explorer into the hard, unforgiving cliff face. Just as the scan was complete, the ocean began making a low, rolling noise as a large current swept towards me and my Seamoth, and I scrambled to get in and pulled up on the depth control throttle, yelling "Karen! Divert power to vertical thrusters!" to maximize my ascension speed, ascending at top speed immediately to get clear of the cliff in case I was caught up in the current. As I feared, the current swept me up and towards the cliff, my Seamoth just barely dinging against the top of the cliff, leaving no more than a large dent in the bottom of the hull.

I quickly returned to my base, building a series of power relays leading to the Jellyshroom Caves opening so that I didn't have to go all the way back to home base to deposit my uranium. After constructing the reactor and connecting to the power relays, I discovered that I required distilled water in addition to uranium, which I knew wouldn't be easy to obtain. I decided to temporarily backlog my reactor project and instead looked in to upgrading my equipment. I knew there was a certain station called an modification station that allowed existing equipment and tools to be upgraded in a variety of ways. Now it was time to find out where the hell I could find one.


	12. Time for an Upgrade

The first place I checked for upgrade station fragments was the Jellyshroom Caves, and I grabbed additional uranium while I was there. My efforts didn't yield any fragments for the upgrade station, but instead, I found multiple fragments of a propulsion cannon, a tool that could pick up smaller objects and carry them around, or throw them away from the operator, life forms included. I decided I'd craft that later, and I vacated the area, choosing to check a new biome for upgrade station fragments. As I exited the tunnel leading to the Jellyshroom Caves, I saw and odd sight: there pink, buoyant creatures, filled with air, that had attached themselves to large boulders en masse, making the boulders float.

These "Floaters" were actually 2 creatures in one, with one organism was the center creature, comprising of a mouth with gripping teeth that latched onto whatever they bumped into, and the other organism was a creature that attached itself to the Floater's behind. It then had a membrane that encased the entire Floater's fragile body, except for the mouth, and the gap in between the Floater and membrane was filled to the brim with air. This actually reminded me of an odd place I'd seen recently. I then traveled to the new biome I had seen from a distance on my previous journey to the Grand Reef, the unique biome being an odd collection of underwater islands, being held up by what seemed to be giant floaters. I had seen some transmitter tech there on the way by, but never investigated it. That's where I found the frag. The upgrade station wasn't an easy build, requiring an advanced wiring kit, something I had little experience with. I had made a couple to make my Moonpool and the terraformer, but the modification station required even more advanced materials in addition to the advanced wiring kit, which was already two gold chunks and a computer chip, which was 2 chunks of table coral (a unique, disk-shaped coral shelf), 2 silver, and one quartz thing easy gold was just over at the Jellyshroom Caves.

I had scanned the resource nodes there, finding out that they were basalt outcroppings, forming around gold, uranium, and, although rarely, diamonds. I got my first diamond on a gold run, and Karen said that if I could get the right materials, mainly another advanced wiring kit and other advanced materials, I could use the diamond to create a laser cutter to explore the wrecks I had seen around the ocean so far. The first I came across was in the Grassy Plateaus, and with a sealed door, I was unable to gain entrance due to a lack of a cutting tool strong enough to open the door. I'd come back for that later, knowing that I'd need advanced higher-capacity tanks to safely explore the wreck without getting lost within and drowning, and a cutter to open the door. I now had the potential to make a laser cutter, but I had yet to gain high-capacity O2 tanks, so I set exploring the wreck as a side-objective in my mind. I returned to my central base hub, going to the singular, top modular base room, where I had lockers lining the walls, all full of resources and materials for crafting and building. I had one area where I had a window looking out into the Creepvine Forest, and right in front of it, there was a small square panel, just big enough for an upgrade station. I pulled out my builder, selecting the upgrade station blueprint, and the red hologram turned green and snapped to the panel perfectly when put near the square, indicating that it was meant to go there.

I began transmuting materials into the builder, which rearranged their molecular structure into the required shape, size, and form needed for the construction of the upgrade station, slowly filling in the holographic blueprint flawlessly. There was a puff of matter particles as the upgrade station's construction was completed, and the station's four upgrade material transmitters retracted to reveal a table where tools and equipment could be improved. As I scrolled through the possible upgrades for my tools, the main one that caught my eye was the high-capacity O2 tank. It required one regular tank and a plasteel ingot, which was easy for me to make considering my personal connection to the dominant male that controlled the Mushroom Forest and its lithium, the active ingredient in making titanium into plasteel. I made 3 plasteel ingots, using up a lot of my titanium in the process, although it was quite easy to replace the materials I'd spent, and combined each ingot with one regular O2 tank, increasing each of their capacities from 35 to 70. Instead of 150 oxygen units, I now had 255 units of O2, and with my rebreather, it lasted just as long 600 meters below sea level as it did 10 meters below!

I had already gone out and collected resources for the laser cutter, but I felt like something was still missing: a weapon. I did have the propulsion cannon built, which would help get rid of smaller predators such as Biter Fish and Bleeders, but I decided that I needed something effective against all hostiles. I had Karen once again pull footage from the Aurora's onboard cams, and saw that a non-lethal experimental weapon called the stasis rifle had been approved for testing on our mission, and that the few rifles we had landed in the Creepvine forest. I was baffled that I hadn't seen the fragments before, but when I finally found them, I understood why. The stasis rifle parts were titanium-based and quite small, making ideal scrap for Stalkers to collect. I got an idea that would help the search go faster, and it took minimal effort on my part. All I did was fabricate a gravsphere, which is essentially a deployable, omni-directional tractor beam, which dragged in small objects with a localized gravity well. It made catching fish super-easy, and lots of fish meant I got to feed a lot of Stalkers. All I had to do was feed a bunch of them and wait for them to return with scrap metal, and hopefully a stasis rifle fragment.

Within minutes of the Stalkers combing the Creepvine Forest for salvage, I had 4 stasis rifle fragments, and I fed all the participants a second time, making a lot of Stalkers very happy with me. I grabbed as many of the metal sheets as I could, then helped some of the Stalkers carry metal back to their dens until there was no more scrap left. I returned to home base with lots of salvage ready to be broken down into titanium, and some Stalkers had been so eager to please that they went out and found sandstone outcroppings, chewed them open, and brought back the contents! No lack of gold and silver for me! All I had to do was get a bunch of table coral, an easy thing to do, and I had enough quartz, gold, and silver to make computer chips and advanced wiring kits for days. With one advanced wiring kit, one silicone mat, one power cell, and one titanium chunk, I fabricated the high-tech stasis rifle, a non-violent tool that shot out a projectile which, depending on how charged up the rifle was, will create a large, long-lasting bubble of stasis, freezing anything and everything in its radius. However, and my suit had special countermeasures against this, as did Crabsnakes, with their slimy, odd flesh making them immune to all forms of stasis.

Before I went exploring the nearby wreck, however, I wanted to see what other upgrades were available for some of my tools and equipment. I went over to the modification station and went to the diving suit category, seeing a few interesting options. One was an armored dive suit, designed to reduce incoming damage but also slowing me down with added weight due to armor plating. The best option I saw was the stillsuit, a wetsuit that... *ahem*... "recycled" water from my body, distilling it, allowing me to be able to safely drink it for a partial "refund". The bonus was that if I had to pee, I could do it in the suit. I upgraded my that, realizing that the distilled water plus uranium could fuel my nuclear reactor! I quickly sped over to my nuclear reactor, bringing a chunk of uranium with me, and as my suit "produced" distilled water, I took it out and hooked up the container to the reactor's water intake valve, turning the nozzle to allow the water into the chamber. I inserted the uranium into the central chamber and closed it up once it was in place. I then hit the start button, which drained the central chamber of all of water, then filled it with the distilled water, turning it into heavy water in the special diffusion chamber. Or something. I didn't exactly understand it, all I knew was that distilled water somehow became heavy water, and submerged the uranium, then fission took place and produced power.

I didn't ask questions when I was getting large quantities of energy output from the reactor. Now that I had sufficient power, I could fabricate and modify with abandon, not having to worry about running out of power at night due to overuse and the solar panels not producing energy without sunlight. I returned to my modification station, having made the decision to upgrade my propulsion cannon into a repulsion cannon, which, instead of grabbing and moving objects and being able to throw them a decent distance, the repulsion cannon simply blasted them away. VERY far away. I was ready to go explore the wreck, and I boarded the USS Explorer, ready to investigate.


	13. The Wreck

As I approached the wreck, I exited the Explorer and swam towards the giant chunk of the Aurora's hull, not knowing what awaited me inside, noticing lots of Sandsharks around the area, no doubt attracted to the giant vibration that the wreck must've made upon impact, and the sand that it kicked up as it sunk to the bottom making for an ideal ambush area. I learned that the hard way as I approached what I thought was the sealed entrance to the wreck, as a 7-foot long Sandshark roared like a tiger from hell and burst forth from the sandy substrate, opening its ugly maw nice and wide, exposing rows and rows of jagged, backwards-facing teeth in its upward-facing jaws. I quickly blasted it with my repulsion cannon, making sure to aim it so that the Sandshark was blasted out into the ocean, and not straight into the sand where it could die on impact. Despite my hatred for Sandsharks, I didn't exactly want to murder them. At least, not right now.

I kept my eyes peeled for more predators as I approached the locked bulkhead door of the wreck, and I put away my repulsion cannon and pulled out my laser cutter instead, clicking the starter similar to a welder, and began burning through the metal around the door. It was easier than trying to melt the lock, I knew that, since the locks were designed to sustain unfathomable temperatures in case of emergency, being made out of lead-titanium composite. It was much easier to cut a hole in the titanium wall around the door, so that's exactly what I did. It took a few minutes, considering that titanium took a while to melt through, especially underwater, but I finally finished the cut, making a rough oval big enough for me to fit through. I shoved the door away, breaking open the wreck for the first time since it landed.

The entire section was already flooded, but nothing had really been small enough to get inside save for some Rockgrubs, small, bioluminescent crustaceans that glowed a bright, neon green. Rockgrubs like to scurry around in places that other creatures couldn't get to, and preferred dark, quiet rather than bright, busy reefs, forests, or shallows. I flicked my flashlight on, not worried about predators in an area with Rockgrubs, considering that Rockgrubs tended to not even inhabit areas of potential danger, and looked around for supplies.

What I found were base parts, one of which was a spotlight, which was an automated light that searched for potential threats near the base and shined a bright spotlight on them to highlight the nearby danger. Not too far from where I found and scanned the spotlight, I came across more lighting structures. I found an intact floodlight, which was essentially a battery-operated, high-powered deployable floodlight for illuminating areas in a certain direction. Next to the floodlight, I found and LED lamp, which was a watered-down version of the floodlight, with less powerful lightbulbs, but the light from it went out in all directions like a usual light instead of a directed one, illuminating the area around it in full. Like the floodlight, it was deployable and battery-operated, and I scanned them both, each of them being fully intact and only needing one full scan to add to my blueprints. The LED was actually small enough that it was fabricated at a fabricator, whereas the floodlight was constructed via the builder, being fully positional unlike some of the other buildable structures.

I saw that there wasn't much else besides empty cargo containers in that area, so I searched for a bulkhead door to move on to the next compartment. The bulkhead door was unlocked, surprisingly, but I strained to get the necessary leverage to operate the latch to open the door. I had to use a nearby titanium rod from the wreckage to use as a lever to slowly rotate the handle into place. "That's odd." I thought aloud. "All turn-handle bulkhead doors were replaced with lever operated ones almost a decade ago. This IS the Aurora, right?"As I went around exploring the next compartment, I couldn't shake the feeling that something was wrong. I didn't recognize any of the containers as ones we had on the Aurora, and many of the standard safety features that were mandatory in every room of the Aurora were absent in the rooms of the wreckage. I had my suspicions, and as I returned to my Seamoth for air, I decided to coast around the hull to look for a ship name. I saw what looked to be the start of the word "Aurora" on one part of the hull, but the rest was covered in sand. As I went in for a closer look, the current from the USS Explorer blew the sand off of the rest of the name. It read: "Alterra Atlas".

After a deep breath, I said in a shaky voice "Karen. Bring up any and all files pertaining to an Alterra vessel by the name of 'Atlas'." *C'mon, it's probably just the name of a smaller vessel docked in the Aurora's hangar.* I thought to myself, trying to calm myself down. After a quick *beep* of acknowledgement, Karen began reading the most relevant piece of information she could find. "The Alterra Atlas was a colony vessel that was en route to [INFORMATION REDACTED] when it was [INFORMATION REDACTED], crashing on the surface of [INFORMATION REDACTED]. The Atlas's crew was presumed MIA or KIA, with all hands being considered lost. Maiden flight: May 26th, 2098. Last flight: June 19th, 2099."

My blood ran cold as this revelation hit me, like a stab to the heart, piercing my very soul. "They knew. This whole time, they knew we were going crash here." I whispered to myself in horror. "The Alterra Science Company sent us here on purpose! They knew the risks of coming to this god-forsaken planet and they sent us here anyway! They didn't CARE about the consequences, only the RESULTS! They figured that if the ship crashed, no one on board would live to expose them." I can't let them win. I promise to bring the Alterra Science Company down. I will persevere. I will survive. They'll hear... THE TRUTH!


	14. The Cyclops

I was out for justice. Not blood. Not revenge. Justice. It's what the poor souls aboard the Aurora deserved foor being lied to and manipulated into a literal suicide run. The Alterra Science Company new that we'd probably crash and die on the planet Subnautica, but they didn't count on my will to live. My ingenuity. My determination. I vowed to survive against all odds and return to civilization with proof of Alterra's treachery. They had already sent people to this planet before, in 2099, and it was now 2107, and they still were sending people there, trying to gather data on the mysterious energy blast that brought down every ship that ventured into the planet's exosphere. And they didn't care how many people got hurt. Or perhaps they wanted to observe and see how well humans could adapt to living on an ocean planet. That would explain why my life pod was the only one that was recorded successfully launching. Did I get "lucky"? Did I survive because I picked the one life pod that wasn't rigged to fail? It was time for some goddamn answers, and I was going to go straight to the source: the Aurora itself. I had a feeling that the ship's black box was intact somewhere, and I was going to find it no matter what the risk.

Determined, I hopped into the USS Explorer, my trusty Seamoth, and headed towards the aft section of the Aurora, noticing that part of it had collapsed into a ramp-like pile of debris. As I approached it, I heard the unearthly roars of the "Reaper Leviathan", the large creature I had almost gotten eaten by a while back. I thought I could steer clear of it, but it seemed to be guarding the aft section quite carefully. Karen, my onboard AI companion, had a suggestion. "Perhaps the it's attracted to the odd energy signature emanating from the Aurora's drive core. That would explain its odd head crest's function. Perhaps it senses energy signatures." I obviously wasn't going to make it past him with the Seamoth. I was going to need a bigger boat. I had already scanned the required fragments for both the Cyclops engine and bridge. Now was the easy fragment: the hull. I casually patrolled around the Grassy Plateaus, watching for Cyclops hull fragments, a task that took all of a bout 10 minutes. The Cyclops blueprint was complete! Now all I needed to do was gather the required resources. This was quite a monumental task, all the materials required being 50 titanium chunks, 5 lithium chunks, 2 silver chunks, 1 quartz crystal, 2 table coral chunks, 2 gold, 4 Creepvine seed clusters, 5 Stalker teeth, and an additional 15 quartz crystals. Yeah. No easy task. I had 3 panes of glass and a spare quartz crystal already, and I had enough lithium and titanium to make 3 plasteel ingots, but I still needed 20 more titanium chunks. I set out to the shallows, collected 6 quartz crystals, 5 metal salvage scraps, and broke off some table coral. That took care of the plasteel ingots and enameled glass I needed.

After returning to base and depositing the materials in a locker, I simply swam outside and grabbed 4 Creepvine seed clusters, fabricating them into 2 bottles of lubricant. The oil secreted by the seed pods made for effective lubricant. I had plenty of gold and silver, now all I had to do was combine it all. I made a computer chip, using it to make an advanced wiring kit, fabricated 5 enameled glass, 5 plasteel ingots, and reported to the Mobile Vehicle Bay. I brought up the menu and selected the Cyclops under the Submarine category, and a huge, 180-foot long hologram appeared in front of me, an outline of the Cyclops, and the 4 constructor bots got to work filling it in with all the required materials. It took a lot longer to build than the Seamoth, and during the construction, I thought of what I'd name it. Then it hit me: the USS Mayflower, after the first ship to arrive in America. The first submarine to traverse the oceans of Subnautica would be named after the first vessel to arrive in the New World. How fitting. Now it was time for its maiden voyage.

As I entered the airlock hatch on the Mayflower, I entered into the lower deck area, which had built-in lockers and a ladder up to the bridge. I moved toward the back of the sub, looked up, and saw what seemed to be a Seamoth docking area, and the floor beneath me had a seal down the middle, as if it opened up to allow entry to a docking Seamoth. I moved to the very back of the Mayflower and climbed up into the engine room, which had six brand-new power cells hooked up to it, 3 on each side, which powered the main drive shaft. I worked my way to the middle of the upper deck, noticing a Cyclops upgrade station next to the power cells on the port side of the engine, with 4 empty slots for upgrade modules.

The middle of the ship had a hatch for entry into whatever was docked in the hangar, confirming my suspicions of being able to dock the Explorer inside the USS USS Mayflower had some room for furnishings in the middle of the upper deck, and the vestibule between the bridge and middle section was perfect for lockers to be added. The bridge of the ship was by far the most impressive, boasting large, high-definition displays for all the submarine's system data and readouts, and customization consoles for naming the ship. I went over and typed in "USS Mayflower", and was perplexed when it came to choosing colors. I decided to go the a different color scheme than the Explorer's, and made it a dark shade of blue, with red secondary colors and white as the tertiary color. It was one hell of a patriotic vehicle, and it fit the Mayflower's name perfectly.

What better to color a vessel named after the first ship to come to America than red, white, and blue? It also fit my French heritage, and resonated with many other countries back on Earth, including Russia, the United Kingdom, Australia, Iceland, Korea, Norway, and more. The USS Explorer was the same color as the Swedish flag and a few other countries' flags as well, but it was mostly my hometown that led me to make it navy blue and yellow, the hometown colors of Spencerport, New York. I was one patriotic explorer, and I was determined to make the best of being stranded on this god forsaken planet, claiming new territories for my country on an unexplored world. But first, I wanted some answers.


	15. The Aurora

I began running through the shallow water as fast as my legs would carry me, and the Crawlers began leaping into action, attempting to avenge their fallen comrade that I had accidentally crushed underfoot. As soon as I was free of the water, I sprinted full speed towards the bulkhead door, and thankfully the door had a lever instead of one of those impossible-to-open valve-wheels, but the lever was jammed. I summoned all of my strength for one, final pull, and the door creaked as it strained to open. The moment I was able to fit through the gap, I darted into the engine room and slammed the door shut, hearing frustrated screeches and thumps as the Cave Crawlers tried to break down the door. There was no way they'd get in, and I had made it to my objective. The emergency lighting lit up the engine room quite adequately, and Karen began a 360 degree scan of the area. "Internal damage is inconsistent with internal malfunction.

Attempts to access the in-flight black box are encountering interference." I dived into the flooded lower deck of the engine room, and saw that there were over a dozen breaches in the 4 four drive cores' outer lining, and as I welded one shut, Karen announced "13 radiation leaks remaining." I went around from pillar to pillar, repairing each breach I came across, and as I came across the last few, a small group of Bleeders converged upon my location. I pulled out my knife and slashed at them to fight them off, and welded the last few punctures as quickly as I could. I then surfaced and continued repairing the rest of the breaches above the water. As I walked from one pillar to another, I saw an upgrade module station, and three of the four modules were fried. However, the fourth module was intact, and it was a power efficiency module, which, when scanned, I found out was compatible with the Cyclops' upgrade station as well. It increased the Cyclops' energy efficiency by 100%, effectively doubling the life-span of each of the six power cells. Upon repairing all of the radiation leaks, Karen stated that the radiation leaks would subside in 3 days, 10 hours. However, despite the decrease in radiation, Karen was still encountering interference from an outside source when she tried to access the black box's information.

Something fishy was going on, but at least I knew that the Aurora's crash wasn't caused by a malfunction. Alterra may have rigged the Aurora to crash, or perhaps an outside, third party had shot down the Aurora. Without access to the black box, I couldn't know for sure, and Karen was unable to locate the source of the blocking signal. Perhaps the radiation had to fully dissipate before the interference disappeared, or perhaps the black box was malfunctioning. I couldn't afford to be overly paranoid, not wanting to return to society as a stereotypical crazed paranoiac. That was a mystery for another day, as I dove into the water, taking a tunnel-like shortcut through the hull and back outside of the Aurora.

I swam back to my Seamoth as soon as possible, and went full speed back to the Mayflower, and installed the energy efficiency module into the Cyclops' upgrade station. I then inserted my signal chip into my on-board computer and the beacon bloomed into view on the Mayflower's HUD as I started the engine and lurched towards the signal, eagerly awaiting my arrival at the island. I was 1,374 meters from the land mass, but with my Cyclops energy efficiency module, I'd make it before I ran out of power. Perhaps there was more information on the island, or, if I was lucky, other survivors. After all, the Atlas crashed only a few years back, and if I could survive as long as I had so far, who says that no one else on a slightly older ship survived as well? I decided it was definitely worth exploring the island, and I was determined to find it and establish a foothold there. Little did I know that getting there would be a serious challenge.


	16. The Duel

As I approached the land mass signal in the USS Mayflower, I heard the telltale roar of another Reaper Leviathan. I was approximately 100 meters from the island's shore, and I saw my unstoppable enemy emerge from behind the island's base, cutting through the crystal-clear, green-tinted water straight towards the Mayflower, bumping its body against the cockpit and slamming its tail into the hull, desperate to pry my Cyclops open to get to the soft, meaty morsel inside- me. After being pushed around by the Reaper for a few minutes, I decided it was time to take the fight to the enemy. I temporarily withdrew from the area around the island, returning to my base to fabricate a pair of torpedo systems for the USS Explorer, as well as vortex torpedoes for ammuniton. I removed the pressure compensators and storage system from the Explorer and replaced both modules with torpedo systems. I loaded each torpedo tube to the brim with vortex torpedoes, which created a non-lethal, black hole-like vortex that drew in matter around it, then flung it far, far away, no matter what size. I also had my power efficiency module and perimeter defense system as well, so that I could shock the Reaper while I reloaded my torpedoes.

With full torpedo tubes and enough torpedoes to fully reload each tube twice, I docked the Explorer inside the Mayflower and rushed back to the island, parking the Mayflower just outside of the island's boundaries, disembarking the USS Explorer and initiating a sunset-lit duel of two adversaries as I charged straight at the Reaper Leviathan, the electromagnetic shock system whining as it charged up to full power, and as I reached 100%, I released the pulse, which temporarily stunned the Reaper as I lined up a perfect torpedo shot right at his face. The torpedo came rocketing out of the torpedo tube, leaving a thick trail of bubbles as its powerful propeller pushed it forward at high speed, and impacted the side of the Reaper's face, imploding and forming a vortex, which caught onto his head and began whipping him around by his neck, making the Reaper roar in frustration as he was dragged around like a ragdoll. As the vortex dissipated, the Reaper was quite visibly shaken by its intense thrashing. However, he quickly recovered, and after my second torpedo tube missed him, he grabbed onto the Explorer with his 4 appendages and began crushing the hull with all 4 of them digging in the best they could. I charged up a 20% electric shock, and got him to let go just as the hull integrity was getting dangerously low.

The Reaper then swung his tail at me, narrowly missing the Seamoth, but still sending me spiraling out of control. Once I righted myself, I scrambled out of my Seamoth and welded some of the punctures shut, returning the Seamoth's hull integrity to 91%. I rushed back into the fight, using a risky tactic of playing chicken with the Reaper Leviathan as he charged straight at me, roaring in anger. At the last second, I pulled off a dodge and spun around as quickly as possible, firing a torpedo at the Reaper's tail, and when it connected, I knew it was a lucky shot, but the vortex spun the Reaper around by the tail nonetheless, the centrifugal force making the Reaper's brain flood with blood, making him dizzy and sluggish. As the second vortex dissipated, I capitalized on the Reaper being stunned this time, and sent out a 100% shock towards him. He shrieked in agony, writhing in pain, but as he turned to back off and leave me alone, his tail slammed into my Seamoth, sending it flying and knocking me unconscious.

I woke up a few minutes later with a bad headache, and the Explorer had a leak in its hull where the tail had whipped into it. The Cockpit was filling up fast, and I had to get my helmet on quick to get out and repair the hull. I frantically pulled my helmet on and attached my air tanks, and got out to repair the damages. It was now nighttime in the ocean, and I was about 100 meters from the Mayflower. I heard the screams of Bonesharks below me, just waiting to catch me off guard. As soon as Karen stated that the hull was sealed, I hopped back into the Explorer and returned to the USS Mayflower, making sure to get closer to shore before fully repairing the Seamoth. I finally stepped on solid land, and I was so happy I wanted to kiss the ground beneath my feet.


	17. The Mountain Island

As the orange sun slowly began to rise into the sky, I dropped to my knees on the beach and grabbed two fistfuls of sand, as if to make sure it was real as I cried tears of joy. I was finally out of the godforsaken ocean and was on actual, genuine land. I regained my composure, got ahold of myself, and looked around, studying the plant life and admiring the island and its landscape. The flora was fairly similar to many of the plants back on Earth, and were almost nothing like the underwater plants on Subnautica, except for the fact that some of them glowed. There were vase-shaped, purple plants whose roots resembled little legs that held up the plant's leaves, which curled upward into a vase shape.

There were odd, small, violet mushrooms, normal in shape, but with decent-sized holes in the caps, perhaps to release spores from the top instead of the bottom, and when the wind blew through the holes, the mushroom made an odd rattling noise. I dubbed them "Purple Rattles" after a quick scan, whereas the vase plants were simply called "Purple Vase Plants". Maybe I'd come up with a better name later. Or not. Whatever. There seemed to be a trail of disturbed dirt leading in between a bunch of these unique plants, almost like a path where others had treaded upon before me. I followed said path, unsure of what awaited me at the end of the path. Perhaps there would be a new wreckage to explore on the surface this time, or maybe I'd be unfortunate enough to get my first taste of land-based predators on this inhospitable, hellish planet. What I found was one of the most helpful things I ever found on that planet: fruit trees. The trees I came across were twisted and gnarly, with long, wide leaves with thick, sturdy limbs, from which vaguely pear-shaped, red, glowing fruit dangled.

I was hungry as a bear, but I at least had the sense to scan the delectable-looking fruit before eating, and as luck would have it, they were edible, not to mention high in a cacaphony of vitamins, minerals and other nutrients. As I picked one off of the tree, I noticed it was somewhat soft and juicy, and as I bit into the appetizing fruit, my mouth practically melted with flavor. It was the best-tasting thing I'd eaten since BEFORE I landed here! Even the food in the Aurora's cafeteria wasn't this good, and this was a raw fruit! The juicy look and texture of it didn't misguide either, with the inside being moist and juicy beyond belief. The fruit did have seeds, but they were only slightly bigger than strawberry seeds.

I was finally at a moment of peace and quiet, nothing but serenity and the soothing sounds of the forest around me when I heard the screech of Cave Crawler, undoubtedly here to ruin the day once again. *I don't see any caves here, so why was this little turd even on this island?!* I thought, frustrated with my turn of unfortunate events. Determined not to waste battery power unnecessarily, I pulled out my knife to end the the little scamp's persistent harassment once and for all. The Crawler saw my knife and ran off toward the middle of the island, and I chased after it, hoping it would lead me to where it came from. Eventually. After nearly losing it in the forest, I saw it scuttling into a cave carved into the mountain and dashed after it.

Sure enough, there were plenty more of the little bastards waiting for me inside, and I flipped my knife into a stabbing position and assumed a combat stance as the swarm leaped towards me in a frenzy. It was time to end their reign of terror on this island, and I cut a swath through their ranks with just my knife and my hands and feet, impaling a jumper in mid-air, grabbing another jumper's leg and slamming into the cave wall with a *crunch*. One tried to bite my foot, so I kicked it as hard as I could, sending it flying into the wall with a sickening *smack*. Another tried crawling up my leg, so I punched it off of me and curb-stomped it with a satisfying *SPLAT*. Control of the mountain island had gone from the Cave Crawlers to America as I planted a crude, makeshift flag on the beach, more symbolic than practical, and the surviving Crawlers jumped into the lagoon in their cave, disappearing into the caverns below the island, never to return as far as I was concerned.


	18. The Feud

After clearing out the Cave Crawlers, I began to explore the cave system they once called home, and it turns out that the winding maze of caves actually emptied out into the ocean! I devised a brilliant plan, which involved a builder, a lot of titanium, glass, and lubricant, and the USS Explorer. I gathered enough titanium to construct a small base platform in the lagoon next to the hole that led to the caves below, with a double-decker modular base room on it, with one floor above the water, and the other below the water.

Next, I gathered the necessary materials for a second Moonpool, and constructed it over top of the opening, connecting it to the bottom floor of the modular base. To power the base, I built a series of power relays leading outside the cave on top of it, and place multiple solar panels there for power. As I went exploring the caves, I also came across many new aquatic plant species, such as the Red Fan, which was similar to its namesake in that its fronds grew "fanned out" into a beautiful, semi-conical display, making them susceptible to pollination due to their attractive nature and soft, comforting fronds, which some fish liked to sit between to rest. There was also an intriguing, aquamarine-colored plant that grew in straight lines on walls, with short, stubby little tubes lightly swaying in the currents that passed through the caves. I returned to the surface and decided to come up with a name for my cave base. I cam up with "the Aquacave", and I docked the USS Explorer in the "Aquapool". I finally had peace and quiet, and I laid down on the floor for a nap.

When I woke up, I noticed that something was scratching and clanging against my base. As I exited through the hatch, I turned around to look at what was on my base, and saw a swarm of angry Cave Crawlers! Apparently, "never to return" was more of a hope than a truth. They wanted me, specifically, so I got their attention with the Explorer and lured them into the water. I let the Crawlers get in nice and close, charging my electric shock system to 100% and holding it, waiting for as many of those bastards to get within range as possible before zapping all of them at once. When the Seamoth couldn't take any more stress, I fried all the Crawlers within range all at once, getting out and taking out the survivors myself.

This time, there were no Crawler survivors left to escape and rebuild. I began to get homesick and tired of this dangerous island, although I did se what seemed to be abandoned structures high up on both of the mountains. I decided that it wasn't worth the risk of climbing the steep mountain faces, but that I might come back another day. I returned to my Creepvine Forest base without incident, and decided to meet up with Stan and Stella, as well as Steve, who was growing up nicely. Stan and I taught young Steve how to hunt for prey.


	19. Family

Their main prey was Peepers, and I showed Steve how to effectively sneak up on a Peeper, catching it with my expert precision, and ended its torment quickly, feeding it to Steve. He then decided to try it out on his own, and he spotted a slow, plump Peeper near the forest's edge. The trick was to move very slowly through thick seagrass or Creepvines below your Prey, with Stalker compensating for their large size with natural camouflage, which they utilized to their advantage. Steve weaved his way underneath the Peeper and raised his tail to give himself a huge burst of speed. He thrust his tail downwards and came rocketing out of the grass like a rocket, jaws agape, catching the Peeper by the body with his jaws, just like Stan had taught him to.

Catching the Peeper was Stan's area of expertise, while mine was sneaking up on it. Together, we molded a fine predator out of Steve, who showed great promise, using both of our best methods to stalk his prey like a true Stalker. He swam off to devour his prize, and happily chomped on the large Peeper. It looked almost comically large in his mouth. The Peeper was a bit thicker than Steve's jaws, and he had to bite off small chunks just to eat the little guy. He then swam off to go help collect metal, which we did every couple of days in the afternoon. I brought back loads of chunks, while Stan brought back 4, and Stella brought back 5. Steve swam into the cave, holding a small scrap in his jaws as he struggled to swim with the over-sized salvage in his mouth. It was a good effort, considering most young Stalkers weren't able to find scrap very well, and the fact that he'd found it was impressive by itself.

We then went off nighttime hunting as a family, and Steve's proficiency with both sneaking and catching were put to the test when we went after a school of 4 Peepers. Stan, Stella, and I all chose our respective Peeper to catch, having been taught how to follow orders and coordinate by me. We each caught our respective Peeper, and the fourth one, not visible from our hiding spot, seemed like it was going to get away, when Steve burst forth from the grass, even startling me with his ability to hide and his agility, and snapped up the Peeper quickly, dropping the morsel next to me as he looked up at me proudly. I pat his head lightly, indicating that he did a good job, and scratched behind his foremost dorsal fin, a common itching spot for Stalkers, further indicating that he did exceptionally well. We returned to our den with our meals, and quickly entered into my base to cook my Peeper, making it more palatable for my human digestive system.

Finally, before the sun rose on the horizon, we went for a moonlight swim around the neighborhood, admiring the beautiful environment around us and showing Steve that he should stay away from the area beyond the forest. After all, while Stalkers were superior to Sandsharks in most regards, a young Stalker was in serious danger when a Sandshark was nearby, and Bonesharks were the apex predators in the ocean besides the Reaper Leviathan, trumping even the ferocity of Stalkers with their sheer strength. Before returning to the safety of the forest, Steve swam off quite a ways away and when we went to go retrieve him, we came across a new carnivore not far from the Jellyshroom Cave entrance.

There was a cave built into the side of a rocky ridge that passed by the Jellyshroom Caves opening, with glowing, hanging purple tentacles with stinging cells similar to a jellyfish's all over them. These "Drooping Stingers" could deliver a 600 watt electromagnetic charge when in contact with organic matter that could be considered food. With zero photosynthetic cells detected by my scanner, it's assumed that it has a carnivorous nature and digests its meal that it kill over several weeks. But this wasn't the most dangerous carnivore we encountered while trying to find Steve. There was another, peculiar creature that hid among the Drooping Stingers' tentacles, and it was not to be underestimated.


	20. Hypnosis

The new, mysterious creature emerged fro a nearby cave system that was dug into the side of a plateau, and was medium in size, and odd-looking as well as -acting, being a small, round creature with 4 wing-like fins, one on each corner around its face. It had 2 large, beady eyes with a mouth directly between them, which seemed toothless at first. As the 4 fins splayed out, the shiny, green and blue creature's skin began shimmering, changing colors all over in a hypnotizing manner. I was immediately entranced by its dazzling display, and I was subconsciously drawn closer to the beautiful creature.

As I got close, its jaws unhinged into four mandibles, all with a single, large, razor-sharp, backward-facing fang, backwards-facing teeth cutting into my helmet, attempting to swallow me whole with its toothless true mouth. I quickly procured my survival knife and stabbed it in one of its mandibles, and as the mesmerizing predator recoiled in agony, I stabbed my knife straight into its throat, ripping the knife out savagely. The creature still refused to die, but as it struggled to swim away, I scanned it, adding it to my database and naming it the "Mesmer", due to its uncanny ability to mesmerize its prey, including things bigger than itself, luring them in and finishing them off with a quick bite from its unsuspecting jaws. It was definitely a force to be reckoned with, one I didn't want to encounter again any time soon, if ever.

The Stalkers and I retreated to the relative safety of the Creepvine Forest, not wanting to meet any new predators of the Grassy Plateaus. I climbed into my base, simply wanting to relax, and perhaps look into new gear for fabrication or some upgrades. As I browsed through the fabrication menu, and noticed that there was a piece of equipment called the dive reel that I had previously overlooked. Reading the description, I discovered that it had a built-in grappling hook, and Subnautica's reduced gravity made it so that the dive reel's grappling hook was strong enough to double as a climbing tool. I gathered some Creepvine to make fabric at the fabricator, and collected enough other materials to finish it.

Taking the grappling hook with me and feeding the Stalkers before my departure, I embarked on the journey back to the Mountain Island, ready to climb some mountains and discover some secrets. Nothing could've prepared me for what I'd find, but I had no idea what awaited. Had I any idea, I might've stayed home that day. On the way there, I managed to avoid a Reaper encounter as I approached the island, and I gazed up at the mountain that my base was built underneath as I prepared to maneuver the Explorer through the mountain cave system. It would be the first mountain I scaled being the closest to my base, and I decided to get as far as I could safely on foot, switching to the grappling hook once things got dangerous. I was about 30 feet up the mountain when the ledges became too narrow to safely traverse. However, on the other side of a ten-foot stretch of inadequate footing, there was a safe platform I could land on.

I peered over the edge of the section I was on, only now realizing that I was no longer on a trail, but an oddly path-like rock shelf that spiraled up and around the mountain. The gap was easily 3 meters (almost 10 feet, my fellow Americans) across, and even with a surface gravity of only 0.89G compared to Earth's 1G, jumping was still out of the question due to being weighed down by my equipment. As I contemplated my conundrum, I spotted a sturdy-looking rock outcropping directly above the gap in front of me, and I got quite the hair-brained idea as I formulated a dangerous plan to get my fat butt over to the other side. I wrapped the high-strength line of the grappling gun around my arm to make sure I didn't lose my grip, and took aim at the rock above me.


	21. Climb, Part 1

I pulled the trigger and the grappling hook embedded itself into the rock above the gap quite sturdily. I then swung across, making sure not to look down at the 30-plus foot drop that awaited me should the line snap under the intense strain of my added weight thanks to my equipment. Then again, if Batman could do it, so could I, right? The line held the whole way over, and I yanked on the line to retract grappling hook, snapping it back into its barrel after retracting all of the line, ready to fire once again.

I worked my way up the rock shelf, again coming across a gap, caused by a broken chunk of rock breaking and falling down leaving a 1 and a half meter (almost 5 foot)-long gap between me and the other side. This one looked less intimidating, being a more level surface to jump from and to, and with no rock outcropping to help me this time, I backed up and got a running head-start as I prepared to jump the shark, so to speak, and as I landed the jump, I lost my balance and began to fall backwards towards the ledge, searching frantically for something to grab on to, but finding nothing. I then saw a slightly raised rock on the wall about 10 feet in front of me, and I used my lightning reflexes to fire my grappling hook into the rock, hoping that my aim was true despite not being able to line up the shot correctly. As I fell backwards, clenching my teeth and practically choking the grappling gun's handle to death, the line went tight and I jolted to a stop as the grappling hook took hold and suspended me just below the ledge. I grabbed onto the grappling gun with both hands, my firing arm almost pulled out of its socket from the grappling line's sudden halt of my descent to the ground below, and pushed the button that cued a strong motor to pull in the line, or in this case, pull something up.

I finally reached the top of the mountain after almost falling prey to the inconspicuous threat of gravity, and what I saw turned my world, or at least this one, upside down. Indeed, my eyes had not deceived me the other day when I thought I saw abandoned seabases on the summits of two of the island's mountains, for in front of me on that day was an abandoned, run-down, derelict seabase, left over from previous survivors no doubt! I run up to the bulkhead door, noticing that it was identical to the design of the doors I came across in the wreckage of the Alterra Atlas, which meant that it had been here for almost a decade, or at least the people who built it arrived here almost 10 years ago.

As I stepped inside, the door creaking on its grimy, dirt-crusted hinges, I flicked on my flashlight, hoping to find some clues as to what happened to the survivors that once lived here. I saw a storage container, which, when opened, provided me with a disinfected water bottle, still good from the look and smell of it. I noticed some new structures around the base, such as a growbed built inside of an observatory, which had an odd, purple vegetable growing inside of it, along with a marble-shaped fruit, similar in pattern to that of a watermelon, and I scanned both of them, dubbing the melon a "Marblemelon", harvesting both of them, not knowing or caring about what to name the vegetable, since it I hated vegetables, but food is food, so I accepted the plant's offering of food despite my personal feelings of animosity towards vegetables. I then scanned the growbed, adding it to my growing collection of blueprints, and continued on to the rest of the base's interior.

At the opposite end of the tiny base was a corridor lined on either side with living walls, which were basically titanium-mesh screens with large gaps to allow vines to grow up them, meant for growing food, but, having no vines available that procured fruit, it was simply a hobby to keep the vines trimmed, keeping one busy on a hostile alien world. It wasn't much good other than decor and as a hobby to keep the vines trimmed and looking nice, at least not above water, but underwater, the living wall's plant inhabitant provided much-needed oxygen in the event of an oxygen pump failure, which could give the inhabitants of the base precious time to fix the oxygen pump and restore the atmosphere inside the base to normal.

There were also some potted plants, now dead, along the floor on either side of the corridor of living walls, and at the end of the hall, where a T-shaped base corridor split into left and right, although unfinished, there was a hanging planter on the wall in the center of the hallway, hanging directly opposite of the center corridor on the wall, right where the middle of the "T" met the top part. I scanned all of these aesthetically pleasing decorations, recognizing that they weren't purely decor as they appeared to be on the surface. There was nothing else in the base for me, except an encrypted PDA message that I couldn't decipher, so I began the descent down the mountain and onto the next.


	22. Climb, Part 2

On the way down, I noticed a large pillar between the two mountains, and, liking to live dangerously, I took aim and fired the grappling hook at the lip of the pillar's top, activating the reel's overdrive feature to quickly zip me right up to the top of the pillar. The rush was exhilarating, and it kept my mind off of the imminent death should I screw up sticking the landing on top of the pillar. Thankfully, I didn't overshoot my target, instead coming up just short of the ledge and grabbing on tight, pulling myself up with great effort and using my upper body strength that I had gained from swimming so much. I then did the same thing with the summit of the second mountain, and stuck the landing even better than last time.

This abandoned base was different from the other one, being even smaller and less about plants and more about production. Again, the hatch was old-fashioned and creaky, but somehow sounded creepier than the other one. Perhaps it was due to the foreboding echo of the creaking of the old door's hinges throughout the desolate, empty base. One of the base's only two rooms held a storage container with a well-preserved nutrient block inside and next to the storage container was something very useful to my survival: a water desalination machine! It consumed a lot of power, but desalinated water from the ocean and poured it into large, half-liter recyclable bottles, depositing the leftover salt into a separate collection chamber. It was a two-in-one hydration station/salt machine, very useful for surviving on an inhospitable ball of water like this one.

The only other room was an observatory, but instead of a growbed inside it, it resembled an office with an amazing view, hanging just barely off of the mountain's edge, with a starship chair and table, with another encrypted PDA message lying on the desk on top of the powerless readout screen that usually displayed the communications relay status.

As I turned around to leave, I saw a busted-up comms relay on the wall, apparently smashed on purpose due to the injuries it sustained. I decided to activate Karen's investigator mode and recreate what happened here. My own detective skills plus Karen's investigative scans could possibly shed some light as to why the comms relay was smashed. I pulled out my scanner and swept the entire room with it, allowing Karen to recreate the entire scene in detail. She even managed to use the footprint residue to ascertain that there had been a struggle in the room, and whoever lost had his head slammed into the comms relay.

Whoever's head was slammed into it had started to bleed, and upon closer inspection, what I thought to be rust on the comms relay's dented section was actually dried blood, confirming Karen's suspicions. Drops on the floor underneath it further convinced her that someone had suffered a wound here in this room, and footprints leading away in a slow, disheveled manner suggested that whoever did the smashing of the head was heavily affected mentally by the act.

The footsteps returned and the pacing and positioning of them showed that he was struggling to pull something... Or someone! Sliding prints on the floor in front of the struggling footprints indicated that someone was being dragged, most likely the victim of the brutal head-bashing, and his feet were dragging on the ground, meaning that the "suspect" probably didn't have an accomplice, since they would've received help from said accomplice when they saw that their partner was having trouble moving the body. If the accomplice helped, then the feet wouldn't have been dragging on the floor. The tracks of the victim's heels stopped outside by the cliff's edge, and the unusually indented suspect's shoe-prints indicated that he had probably picked up and thrown the victim's body into the forest below.

The footsteps returned to the desk and chair, and Karen tried with all her might to decipher the encrypted data download message on the suspect's PDA. Finally, she managed to crack open the lock and download the messages. There was no turning back at this point. As I clicked on the first message, I passed the point of no return.


	23. Revelations

MESSAGE 1: " Dear... Whoever's reading this, I think Harold, the technician, has gone crazy. He's started threatening people with a large, heavy wrench whenever anyone questions his authority or denies him what he requests. The wild look in his eye and unhinged attitude indicates he's probably going bonkers. Then again, who wouldn't, stuck on an island with almost no hope of rescue or escape? Well, not me, I know that. - William"

MESSAGE 2: (RECORDING) "I managed to get a hold of Harold's wrench while he was sleeping and adjusted the last few touches on the comms relay in my "office", and now I'm just waiting until daytime so that the solar panels will provide the power we need to call for help! Hopefully Harold doesn't notice that I borrowed his wrench to fix the comms relay that he's been trying to get rid of... Why is that anyway? Does he not want to get rescued? Or does he know something we don't...? Maybe a little questioning will provide some answ- oh, sh-! (*Door opens. Punch*) H-Harold! Um, look, we can just talk about this like adults, right? Righ-?" Harold: "*Incoherent, screaming what is assumed to be gibberish*."

MESSAGE 3: (RECORDING) "Oh, crap. Crap, crap, crap crap crap. Harold. The crazy bastard bust in on me fine-tuning the comms relay and tried to smash it up after socking me in the jaw. *He continues shakily.* I tried to stop him, and Harold grabbed me and pinned me down on the desk. I grabbed his wrench and slammed it into the side of his head. I punched him in the throat, but he just kept on coming, like a madman on steroids, not even feeling the pain. *William takes a deep breath and continues, his voice cracking slightly.* Finally, I tired the bastard out and slammed his head into the wall. Unfortunately... *He sobs quietly* I slammed him into the comms relay, busting it for good this time! Bloody hell! The only way of this stupid ball of water, ruined. Then again, if Harold was right about what he screamed as he came at me, then maybe we're better off staying here on this planet. What did the crazy bugger say...? "They don't want us on this planet... And they can't let us leave either! The monsters sent us here, and the other monsters want us to die here..." Who knows? Maybe the poor bastard was completely off his rocker, eh? You never know when it comes to survivors of a traumatic disaster. I had to dump his body off the cliff to avoid those damn birds swarming his corpse and taking a shite all over the base. Now what? My base is useless now, everyone else was scared off by Harold while I sat inside tinkering with the comms relay... For all the good that did us. I guess I'll move to the ocean, try to make a living for myself farming or something. Maybe I'll move down into that mushroom cave system and use the thermal vents down there for power... Yeah! That's what I'll do... Sounds... Fun..."

MESSAGE 4: "The mushroom caves are terrifying, but I really don't have a choice. There's food down there and my desalination station has plenty of power 24/7. Or however long the bloody days are on this stupid planet! - William"

MESSAGE 5: "I really want to get out of here. Harold was right. They don't want us here. I can hear their whispers in the night. I don't know what the bloody hell they're saying, yet I understand every word. They don't want us here. They're coming for me. I can hear their champion's roars in my sleep. Sometimes I wake up screaming and sweating. Other times I wake up feeling like I'm drowning in the open air. It's truly haunting. I just want it to end. - William"

MESSAGE 6: (RECORDING) "I went too deep. I tried following the lava. I saw it. I saw the dragon that lurks in the planet's core. Even now, I can hear its unholy roars echoing throughout the ocean. *A monstrous, absolutely terrifying roar straight from Satan's nightmares is heard in the background.* My only hope is the island. But the island has no food... NO! Dammit! No. This isn't how it ends. I'm not gonna starve to death on the beach of some island! I'm gonna stand and fight! Where'd those bloody torpedoes go? There you are... Well... It's time to go out in a blaze of glory. To whoever's reading this, this is William Tholguud, signing off for the last time." END OF MESSAGES.

I sat there stunned, absolutely dumbstruck by what I had just heard and read. So there HAD been other survivors! But that "Dragon" must've got them, just like it did William. It couldn't have been the Reaper Leviathan though... The roar was even worse than the Reaper's, however the hell that was possible. Whatever it was, I hoped I never so much as heard it, let alone saw it. Attached to the last message was a remote camera feed from William's Seamoth, although an older model. The scenery was a huge lava "castle", I suppose is the right word, and a massive silhouette moving out from behind the castle and roaring its terrifying roar as William swore up and down and put the Seamoth in full reverse.

The creature was at least 250 feet long, and had a slightly humanoid upper body, with 2 fin-adorned arms with claws and webbed fingers. Its lower half was comprised of a myriad of long, squid-like tentacles with glowing lights on them. The head of the beast, like most of the creature, was hard to make out, but what I could clearly see was a huge, gaping mouth as the leviathan let out a blood-chilling roar that shook the entire Seamoth, and two glowing, beady orange eyes on each side of its face as it emerged from behind the black castle. A dragon indeed.

I slowly descended the mountain, trying to process the information I had just received, and on the way down, I saw a third abandoned base, this one being the biggest of the three, but with part of the wall ripped out and part of the base buried under a rock slide. Again, I opened the creaking door, this one being much dirtier and harder to open than the others, and stepped inside.

This base just had more plants than the others, and their storage container contained a power cell, fully charged. I tried to get to the last room, and after finally clearing out the dirt wall that stood between the rest of the base and the modular room buried under the earth, I stepped inside and saw an intriguing sight. In the center of the room was a large aquarium, also known as a modular aquarium, which was a large, round glass cylinder in the center of the room, meant to house fish and other aquatic life, with a standard planter built into the substrate. It has a large coral formation, now dried up, in the center, where dried-up, dead mushrooms once bloomed. There was even a hatch on the far side of it, meant to allow people to go inside of it for maintenance purposes.

I scanned the large aquarium and added yet another blueprint to my list. I liked the idea of having a fish tank in my base, and thought about the myriad of possibilities one would open up. I could breed fish for food, I could grow aquatic plants to eat, like Creepvine, or to use as fabrication materials. However, the modular aquarium relied heavily upon glass for construction, requiring 4 glass panels per large tank.

One interesting feature was the modular aquarium's ability to stack on top of one another, effectively increasing the tank's carrying capacity as the tanks fused together to create one taller one. This tank would prove very useful in my near future. Outside of the base, there was another Marblemelon growbed, this time being designed for exterior use outside of the base. I scanned this one last structure, the last of the new blueprints I would gain from this island. I had always wanted a garden, and now I had the means to do so and a good reason as well.


	24. Downtime

With plenty of new technology to implement into my base, I returned to my central forest base, thinking of what to add first. I decided I'd get started on the modular fish tank first, and I created a three-story aquarium in the central hub of my base. I then added a hatch on the far side of the tank's bottom layer to allow discreet access to the interior of the tank. A long as the aquarium was powered, it basically took care of itself, with an oxygen/carbon dioxide bubbler, a built-in substrate filter, and it even fed its inhabitants by filtering out food from the ocean outside the base and feeding it to the fish inside once there was enough food to make a substantial meal. It was also able to collect a number of natural fertilizers from both the inside of the tank and the water outside the base in order to fertilize the plants and fungi in the tank. Sometimes, the tank didn't even need to collect food from outside if the plants and fungi inside produced a natural food source for the inhabitants inside.

This tended to be the case with Boomerangs, which ate coral, and Spadefish, which sifted through the sand to find invertebrates and sometimes crustaceans to crush up and eat with their wide, flat, strong, crushing teeth. Coral naturally grew due to the filter bringing in mostly unfiltered ocean water, which contained coral polyps that accumulated and reproduced to form coral structures, which Boomerangs used their rigid, crunching teeth the break off chunks of and crush into a digestible powder. For Spadefish, the substrate was taken straight from the ocean floor near the base, and it changed out every day, bringing in new invertebrates and crustaceans and mollusks every 24 hours. I decided I wanted to put two of each small fish inside my main tank, so I caught and

added two Peepers, two Boomerangs, two Hoverfish, two Spadefish, two Hoopfish, a new species that used two fin-like antennae to create a low-density pocket of water in front of them to swim very quickly, as well as two Holefish, which were small, schooling fish that dwelled in and around caves, with a mushroom-shaped silhouette with an odd, large hole in its body right in front of the caudal fin, allowing it to make unexpected turns and maneuvers, useful for dodging predators. It could also move in front of a bioluminescent plant, and the hole would look like the eye of a predator such as a Boneshark or Sandshark if the trick is played correctly.

The next fish I added was called a Reginald, and it was very similar to a fish back on Earth that was known as the Ocean Sunfish. It was a large, filter-feeding fish, up to ten feet long, and its fins were the most bizarre of anything I'd ever seen. Its fins were almost identical to that of a Black Triggerfish's, being somewhat triangular and providing the main propulsion. Its real tail was just a rounded stub, and the dual fins undulated to propel the fish forwards, whereas its rudder-like tail merely steered it. The only difference was that the Reginald was small, about 10 inches instead of feet, and its mouth was quite different, although still a filter-feeder's mouth. Instead of a wide, gaping mouth, it had 3 odd slits, and as water passed through them, it filtered out plankton and other tiny creatures that thrived in the waters of the Grassy Plateaus, the Reginald's natural habitat.

Up next was the Garryfish, named so due to its uncanny resemblance in body shape to that of Garry from Spongebob Squarepants. It almost looked like an upside-down hatchetfish, with a large hump in the front near its face, which tapered down gradually towards the back, into a long, graceful tail. Its pectoral fins were almost like wings as it glided through the Safe Shallows, its mouth coming to point like a small snout, and the eyes sticking up like stalks on a cartoon snail. The reason for its enlarged torso was actually that it resembled a saltwater pufferfish in its ability to inflate itself slightly, making it look bigger than it actually is. The Garryfish didn't exactly inflate all the way like a balloonfish, but its torso did so as it filled its stretchy swim bladder with air, increasing its apparent height. They weren't as good for eating as they looked, most of the meatier-looking portion actually being air, but they had an orange body with soft stripes that looked attractive, and they cleaned up the tank with their narrow snout, so they were worth having in my tank.

The final fish, and the hardest to find, was the Eyeye. It was a very simple and primitive creature, having no substantial brain to speak of, merely relying on pure instinct to dictate its actions. It was basically a very large eye with fins connected to its behind, spreading to 4 rays behind it to form 4 net-like membranes that caught drifting plankton and other tiny creatures, as well as doubled as fins. Its actually so dumb that when confronted up close, it doesn't know how to swim away. Its primary defense is to use its immense, hyper-sensitive eye to spot danger from far away and vibrate its fins to make a loud screaming sound, warning other creatures of approaching danger, and the Eyeye merely swims the other way once it spots the danger and begins "screaming". While not very interesting in its behavior, it was interesting to look at, being mainly olive green with cool blue fins. Lastly, I added two Airsacks to complete the tank.

As I would soon find out, each of these species could change genders to reproduce, and pretty soon, I had baby versions of each fish swimming around. To please the Hoverfish and Eyeyes, I planted a few Creepvines on one side of the tank, whereas I planted a tentacle-shaped plant called a Blue Tentacle on the other side for fish that dwelled in the Shallows, along with a couple of acid mushrooms as well.

On another section, I planted two Sea Fans, which were coral plants that were almost identical to ones on Earth, being shaped like a classic Asian fan. They mainly grew in the Grassy Plateaus, and in the other two slots, I planted Bloodgrass for shy baby fish to hide in. The fourth and final section of 4 planters out of the 16 total was in between the Shallows section and Creepvine section, and was comprised of seagrass.

My main tank was complete, but if I wanted to raise some of the bigger creatures, they'd need their own tanks for full natural environmental immersion. I climbed through the hatch in my tank, gazing up at my beautiful fish as they gracefully swam around above me, Peepers and Boomerangs and Hoopfish and Holefish swimming around in a circle above me, with Reginalds swimming in between the Seafans while the Spadefish dug around the roots of Bloodgrass. Hoverfish swam around the seagrass while Eyeyes hid in the Creepvines while they adjusted to their new surroundings. The Airsacks liked to hang out near the filter output where new water came in, and Garryfish cleaned off parasites from acid mushrooms and Blue Tentacles, puffing up slightly when approached by another fish. Now that I had fish reproducing, I basically had an endless source of food.


	25. Tremors

I wanted to have some Shuttle bugs living near my base to keep it clean, so I used the terraformer to carve out a natural-looking cave, and made sure to make it down-current of my plants, so that any decaying plant matter would collect in the caves, attracting Shuttlebugs due to their love for eating decaying organic matter.

Within a couple of days, I had a few Shuttlebugs living in the cave, and a few days later, I entered into the cave to see a few round, dark greyish-purple eggs, similar in color to most Shuttlebugs, sitting in one corner of the cave. I decided to make the cave go deeper, having multiple caverns within it, and having small, more private areas for Shuttlebugs to mate and lay eggs in.

All this terraforming wasn't exactly sitting very well with one of Subnautica's most mysterious and potentially dangerous denizens. As I continued making the cave go deeper, there was a rumbling sound and the ocean floor shook as some of it began popping up quite a bit, almost like a giant mole was digging underneath the substrate. I could feel each vibration as the bump passed right under me, and as they grew stronger as it approached, and weaker as it ran off. I knew it wasn't a natural phenomenon. There was some sort of creature behind it, and it didn't seem too pleased with me altering its environment.

Eventually, after making sure that nothing was coming back for a second pass, I used the terraformer to slowly and carefully dig a hole in the ridge left behind. What I saw beneath it meant very bad news for me. The tunnel left behind was huge, being extremely long and and almost 5 meters in diameter! It had a primitive, imperfect pattern to the digging marks, meaning that whatever did this was definitely not a machine, but it WAS huge. Judging by the excavation pattern, it was one single creature, not many small ones, that dug the tunnel, and I looked through my database, trying to think of a creature capable of doing such a monumental task. Until now, there were no creatures I had encountered that were able to do such a thing. I dreaded the day I actually met this massive marine mole, and if I never met it, it'd be too soon. Little did I know that I would come face-to-ugly-face with the creature much sooner than never, much to my chagrin.

Over the next couple days, I tried to tone down my terraforming operations, hoping that a reduction in geographic disturbances would keep the giant creature away from me for a while. Unfortunately, my hopes were entirely just that: hopes. Hopes that would go unfounded as I was confronted with the creature. The way I encountered what was behind the tunneling was actually quite frightening: the monster had actually dug a tunnel quite slowly to a spot in the sand, to avoid being seen, and created a small, expandable hole in the ocean floor, almost like a trapdoor spider with a giant, sphincter-like door.

It was unknown exactly how it created its door, but perhaps it was merely something the creature could make from its own body, or that of another animal. It used its digging appendages, which resembled large claws, to stretch out the door's edges, allowing the massive creature to emerge and ambush its prey. My first reaction to seeing its door was to investigate, although cautiously. I kept my stasis rifle at the ready, in case I needed to retreat.

As I approached the door, the giant creature emerged and swiped at me with its huge pincer-like arms. It was quite large, with most of its body still underground, but it was crab-like, with a bug-like body and its excavation appendages resembling tusks compared to the rest of its body.

My heart nearly jumped out of my chest when it burst forth from its lair, and I immediately pulled out my stasis rifle and blasted a 30% strength blast into its face, with the stasis dome being only 30% of its max size and duration. I swam away at top speed, not wanting to face that thing in a "fair" fight. I swam to the moonpool and entered the USS Explorer, loading up on vortex torpedoes for a battle with this "Sandcrab".


	26. Sandcrab

I launched a vortex torpedo next to the Sandcrab's door, hoping that the vortex would suck it in and pull it out of its lair. As the vortex began sucking in the Sandcrab, the creature became highly aggravated, and as it began to be pulled out, it was revealed that it had additional claw appendages along it entire body. It used them to dig into the ground and hold its own against the tremendous force of the vortex, making it impossible to uproot from its lair.

I decided to take a more direct approach, and launched a second vortex torpedo right at the Sandcrab's face, scoring a direct hit as the Sandcrab recoiled in shock from the blast and began twisting and turning, trying to escape the second vortex. However, its initial moment of shock was the key to its downfall as the Sandcrab was pulled from its lair and exposed to the environment around it. I then charged full speed ahead as the familiar whine of the Explorer's perimeter defense system grew higher and higher, building up to a 100% shock to force the Sandcrab into a tactical retreat.

The Sandcrab had thick, hard-to-penetrate armor covering its body, making the electric pulse less effective, but it still hurt like hell, judging by the way the Sandcrab screamed in agony. It quickly ran off, realizing it was severely outmatched, and its burrowed under the substrate as soon as possible and made haste as it dug its way to safety. It wouldn't be the last I saw of the Sandcrab, and I knew it, so I began constructing an arena where I could control the variables of the environment to my advantage.

The arena was on top of a large plateau in the Grassy Plateaus, quite a ways away from my base to avoid collateral damage, something that easily could've happened during the last battle. I knew that all the terraforming to create the arena would attract the Sandcrab to my location, and that it wasn't a question of if he'd show up, but when. It was only a matter of time until he arrived to confront me and try to halt my progress- permanently. I had to act fast. I exchanged three of the USS Explorer's modules for three hull reinforcement modules to reduce damage taken from collisions, knowing that I'd probably have to ram the Sandcrab to death if I needed to kill it, something I didn't want to have to do, but knowing it may be necessary.

Sure enough, a few minutes after I finished terraforming, the ground began to shake and the Sandcrab emerged from the center of the massive arena, roaring as it loomed over me like a living mountain. I had the opening move, and I rammed the Sandcrab at full speed, slamming into the monstrous subterranean predator's midsection, trying to cause him as much pain as possible, charging up the perimeter defense system for a painful follow-up shock. Being right up against the Sandcrab's body increased the effectiveness of the shockwave, conducting the electricity straight to its body, and the Sandcrab howled in pain as its nervous system was flooded with high-voltage electricity.

Once it recovered, the Sandcrab countered by attempting to spear the Seamoth's cockpit with one of its appendages, but all it managed to do to its frictionless glass was scratch it up a bit. *Thank god for Alterra Science, even if they did send me to my death on this goddamned planet...* I thought to myself, knowing I was lucky to be alive.

As the Sandcrab launched his next attack, however, I knew my chances of surviving this encounter had decreased dramatically. The Sandcrab was obviously the king of the subterranean world, and as it called out to its subjects, a platoon of Sandsharks burst forth from the substrate, eager to obey the king of the earth they relied on so much, in fear of being hunted down and devoured for using the substrate without the Sandcrab's blessing. I went with an 80% shock, knowing that it was just enough to render all the Sandsharks unconscious, and I was correct as they all convulsed momentarily, then fell limp and sunk to the bottom, still breathing, but asleep for now.

The Sandcrab growled, obviously displeased with the failure of its minions, and charged at me angrily, and as I set the throttle full-speed ahead, I prepared to clash with the Sandcrab in a mighty battle. I crushed the Sandcrab's ugly face, horribly disfiguring him and temporarily blinding him, but for a price. The USS Explorer had cracks in the cockpit bubble, and a couple of hull breaches, and the total hull integrity was at 34%.

The Sandcrab was still not giving up, dedicated to end my presence on this planet, and I knew I was going to need a bigger boat. I had prepared for this contingency, however, and I ascended into the docking bay of the USS Mayflower, waiting above as my secret weapon. Taking command of the 180-foot-long submarine, I rammed it into the Sandcrab, whom I dubbed "Terramorphous", at full speed. The Mayflower's hull held up very well against Terramorphous' thick hide, and the enameled glass of the cockpit barely had so much as a scratch on it from the impact. Terramorphous knew he was beaten, and he retreated for the last time, realizing that there was a new king of the subterranean realm on this planet- me.


	27. The Exosuit

As the new king of Subnautica's subterranean realm, as long as I was in my Seamoth or Cyclops, all the Sandsharks left me alone, knowing all too well what I was capable of, at least with my Cyclops and Seamoth. I found that by altering the pitch and other aspects of the Mayflower's horn, I could imitate the commands of the Sandcrab and relay them to the Sandsharks. While they weren't exactly intelligent, they could at least learn to take orders when their lives depended on it. Any Sandshark who didn't listen was punished via the repulsion cannon, blasting them into the open ocean, and my punishment seemed to work, as the Sandsharks rarely got out of line. However, they began to realize I wasn't really much of a subterranean ruler like they originally thought, and sometimes, they'd even attack me as I passed them in the Seamoth more and more often. This rebellion was absolutely unacceptable. It was time to make a statement, and no submarine was going to help me this time. I had to get down to their level. I needed to rule the underground like a true subterranean warrior, but without a vehicle that allowed me to walk on the ocean floor while simultaneously holding my own against anyone that challenged my rule, it was one hell of a monumental task.

I tried to make an armored dive suit, which worked quite well when it came to protecting me from damage, but I couldn't really fight back against potential usurpers. The next innovation I came up with was a pair of strength-enhancing gauntlets, which allowed me to knock the crap out of any Sandshark that came at me, but it required a serious amount of energy that I couldn't carry with me while also wearing the armored dive suit. Plus, the problem with my current setup was that I was helpless against most burrowing opponents while wearing it. I needed some sort of digging tool to help me counter hostile Sandsharks.

The next iteration of my combat suit was basically... well, an exosuit. There's no other way to describe it. The exosuit was basically a 3-meter-tall suit of armor, with me sitting inside the pressure-resistant, enameled glass cockpit with my arms hooked into special movement capture sleeves to move the exosuit's arms as if they were my own. The legs worked the same way, and the rest of the exosuit's features were voice-activated, having Karen hard-wired directly into the onboard computer. It had boosters on the feet, the palms of its hands, and its back/shoulders. The suit ran on two power cells, and was able to traverse wherever it was needed. T

he Sandsharks could barely even scratch the hull or cockpit with their teeth, and ramming it barely even made the smallest dent or ding in the hull. Any Sandshark that confronted me would get a servo-powered face full of titanium fist, and for extra-dangerous threats, the elbow was equipped with a miniature turbine engine that propelled the arm forward for an extra-hard-hitting punch. The only thing that the first version was missing was a digging tool, but I had an idea that would take some serious time and effort. I fabricated a second terraformer and began the long, laborious process of hooking it up to the exosuit's onboard systems. This way, I could use it to dig on command, and I didn't sacrifice my fists to have a terraformer, either.

The suit's right hand, while still having the same basic design of a hand, was actually able to be converted into a handheld terraformer. This was the trickiest part for me, not wanting to sacrifice the ability to hit with my strong hand, and eventually I found the perfect balance between versatility and power. The hand was actually built around the terraformer's basic structure, which was virtually identical to the regular hand's wrist structure anyway, and what happened was that the fingers would fold back away from the palm, and the terraformer's other required parts would slide forward and take their places, completing the transformation into a terraformer in under 5 seconds, approximately 3.8 to be exact. This allowed me to dig better than any Sandshark could ever hope to, and if I needed to, I could counter against enemy Sandsharks by digging them out of their hiding place.

As I walked through the flats of the Grassy Plateaus in my badass exosuit, I had Sandsharks jumping out of the sand beside me, and for a while, I went unopposed, but eventually, a plus-sized Sandshark ambushed me out of the sand in front of me. He was 14 feet long, the biggest Sandshark I'd ever seen. He grabbed onto my left arms with his jaws, and I countered with a jab to the nose with my right fist. The huge alpha Sandshark dove down into the sand, hoping to catch me off-guard again, but I quickly uncovered his plans by switching to the terraformer and removing the sand around him, and as he angrily charged towards me, I wound up with my right arm for a big punch, retracting the terraformer as my fist was propelled forward by the turbine. My punch met his face in mid-charge just after turning back into a fist, and I could hear a bone or two snapping as the weight behind the punch truly sank into the alpha's face. I knew that I had won my right to rule from now on. And no one questioned me again. Ever.


	28. Electricity

While it felt good to finally let go of my anger and take out my rage on something that deserved it, in this case, a nasty, angry alpha Sandshark that tried to assert its dominance of the subterranean domain of Subnautica in the wake of the Sandcrab's defeat, I didn't really like beating up animals, no matter how deadly or vicious. I wanted to live in harmony with the environment the best I could, avoiding conflict whenever I could. I realized that I hadn't been the most eco-friendly of visitors on Subnautica, and I went around to all my nearby locales to see what I could do to change things.

I realized that while I had fixed the Aurora and the radiation had dissipated, there were still pollutants from other shipwrecks and the rest of the Aurora spilling out into the ocean. I ventured to the side of the Aurora and searched for leaks of any sort of chemicals, and found quite a few oil leaks, which I carefully welded shut, making sure not to light the entire oil slick on fire. I also found some damaged power cells in storage leaking battery acid into the surrounding water, and I picked them up and took them back to my base to repair and reuse them.

I began replanting Creepvines around the forest I lived in, tossing them into the current, allowing them to spread out naturally. I realized that the output from my nuclear reactor was potentially harmful to the environment I disposed of it in, so I had to start thinking of a safe way to reuse depleted uranium, or at least get rid of it. I knew depleted uranium was often used to make drill bits, so I began using my fabricator to invent a drill arm for the USS Explorer, to allow me to drill for resources from the safety of my cockpit. I knew that the terraformer wasn't always going to be enough for my exosuit to dig through solid rocks and boulders, so I made the left hand conceal another depleted uranium drill, which was tipped with diamonds for extreme drilling power and durability.

I was finally at peace with the environment, but the environment wasn't exactly at peace with me. I had recently uncovered what seemed to be a couple new, particularly nasty biomes.

The first, just beyond the Tree of Life, actually wasn't all that bad. It was a beautiful biome, with bulbous, squishy plants of varying sizes growing everywhere. Squeezing said plants made a *koosh* sound, like a sponge, so I named them "Kooshes". This "Koosh Biome" didn't seem very dangerous at first, with its denizens comprising of Holefish, Boomerangs, Eyeyes, and the occasional Boneshark. However, as I ventured a bit deeper into the fields of Koosh, a large, eel-like creature emerged from behind a huge 8-meter-high, purple ball of Koosh.

At first, I thought it was related to the Crabsnake, but I was quickly corrected as I saw the many prongs going down its body, 4 on each lightly armored section of its segmented body, each one glowing blue, and every once in a while, 4 large, visible bolts of electricity would travel down its body from head to tail. With its upturned, large, small-toothed mouth, I deducted that it shocked large groups of prey and sucked them into its mouth, swallowing them whole. I named the creature the "Shocker", and despite its mainly non-threatening look, its sheer size made it quite an intimidating figure to behold.

It was almost 30 feet long, and when approached too hastily, it would open its mouth and course electricity through its spines, usually more than enough to deter any possible predators. Even Reaper Leviathans that strayed too close had almost no chance of taking on the Shocker one-on-one. The worst part was that Shockers weren't a rare species, instead being a very common sight in the Koosh Biome, sometimes even found in small groups, like whales in a pod. They even worked together, possessing limited intelligence to the point where they would surround a huge "bait ball" of fish and start shocking them, stunning the fish and allowing the Shockers to feast without much effort.

I had to get a DNA sample from the Shocker, maybe even an egg, and I found out the hard way that their eggs gave off a low-voltage field of electricity as I picked an abandoned egg up off of the ocean floor without my rubber gloves. I put the Shocker egg into a separate modular aquarium from my main tank, and so began the nurturing process. As I waited for the egg to hatch, I began working on a prototype DNA transfuser, hoping to research some of Subnautica's inhabitants and their DNA traits.

The DNA from Stanley yielded results in sonar technology, and even the ability to inject other creatures with this ability (not in the wild, of course, that'd be cruel). If injected to an egg, these traits would become permanent upon hatching, and I began looking into more beneficial traits. The Garryfish was an odd creature that like to follow me around and chase off other curious fish that approached me, almost like a tiny bodyguard. I decided to look into his DNA to see if I could duplicate his tendency to try and "protect" me in another animal. I succeeded, and injected the Shocker egg with the serum.

I found that Reginalds had an uncanny healing factor, allowing them to regenerate from severe wounds. I injected this into the egg as well, attempting to breed the perfect bodyguard for myself. One thing I noticed Shockers suffered from was low muscle-mass and therefore, low speed, so I looked into the Biter Fish and the Peeper due to their high muscle-mass percentages and above-average speed. The results yielded a serum that allowed the Shocker to be much stronger and faster, and a new discovery that Peepers also had a low metabolic rate and heart rate made it so that the Shocker's new muscle system wasn't overly taxing on its circulatory system.

The final serum I added was one I had obtained from the Eyeye and Oculus. Both had light-sensitive night vision eyes, but the Oculus was nearly blinded by light, whereas the Eyeye could see day or night, but not as well as the Oculus at night. By finding just the right balance, I made my Shocker into the perfect predator, being fast, dangerous, protective of his family, and able to hunt in pitch-black conditions. When he hatched, I named him Shawn, and Shawn was now my personal bodyguard. He was a fairly gentle giant once mature, and didn't seem to mind sharing company with the Stalker family. He even once protected them from a rabid Sandshark that strayed to far into the forest, and whenever young Steve went out to explore or play, Shawn followed him to ensure his safety.

Despite Stalker eggs hatching in only days, it seemed that once hatched, Stalkers' growth rates dropped dramatically, whereas Shockers took weeks to hatch, and grew to maturity in a matter of days, although not nearly full size. By the time Shawn hit maturity, he was 7 feet long, whereas Steve was about 2 and a half feet long. Even for a Stalker, Steve was a bit of a late bloomer, but he more than made up for it with his excellent hunting and stalking skills, plus having his own personal bodyguard, Shawn. Shawn was like the family guard dog, protecting us from any and all threats, no matter how big and dangerous the were.

Once, a pack of desperate Bonesharks attacked the base, and Shawn and I fought them off all by ourselves. I used the repulsion cannon to push them back as Shawn zapped them with high-voltage electricity to penetrate their thick hides. It was truly epic, and Diablo even showed up to bring the rebellious Bonesharks back to the the Mushroom Forest where they belonged, making sure to bring them food so that they wouldn't have to attack me and the family for food.

When my Spadefish were getting ready to hatch, I injected a Stalker serum into them, giving them sonar capabilities, as well as a Garryfish serum to make them more friendly towards me and other fish. This made them ideal "treasure" hunters, able to detect metal and use their spade-like bodies to dig it up if it was covered by sand and silt. Yes, my family was growing. But soon, something new would threaten my family, something too big for Shawn to fight off, something that would change my life forever. Something far worse than the Reaper. And it was heading straight for me, and anyone who got in its way was as good as fish food.


	29. Close Encounter

Oblivious to the looming threat that awaited me, I continued exploring and found the second new, dangerous biome. It was very deep down, almost 300 meters below the surface, and it reminded me of a reverse Creepvine Forest. It had kelp growing there that was bleach-white, spreading out like empty veins reaching towards the surface in a vain attempt to reach sunlight. The kelp was oily, and at the base of them, some had blood-red sacs of oil growing from their roots. I dubbed these creepy kelps "Blood Kelp" due to their veiny-looking appearance and blood-like oil pods.

The denizens down in the dark of the Blood Kelp Forest were the most horrifying things I'd ever seen. Whereas regular Biter Fish were red and blue, the Blood Biters of this biome were a mottled, almost rotten gold-brown, almost like rust, and they had white, blank eyes and a much nastier attitude than usual Biters. There were also Blood Crawlers, which had longer, more spindly legs that allowed it to cover longer distances quicker. It was very unnerving down there, and the threat of much less friendly Shockers was present there as well.

The odd thing about this biome was that through the Blood Kelp, there seemed to be an old, abandoned railroad track of sorts, almost like a tram system on the ocean floor, meant for transporting people and/or materials from one place to another. I couldn't be sure, however,since it was almost completely destroyed. All it really was was a metal rail curving through the Blood Kelp plants on the ocean floor, which could've been a conveniently positioned piece of debris for all I knew.

Following it led nowhere, and I abandoned trying to find where it led or where it originated from, realizing I was probably chasing ghosts. Further expeditions revealed a second area of Blood Kelp, separate from the first and again, there was a rail-like structure coming into the biome and leading towards the middle. As I explored further, I decided it was worth a shot trying to find where the rail led.

As I approached the middle of the second Blood Kelp Biome, more rails joined into the one I had been following, with a partially-intact rail-switching system connecting them all together. Now I knew it wasn't a coincidence, and the rail led up a hill as it reached it destination. I almost ran into a large, abandoned base as I followed the rail, which led into a garage-like loading bay, where supplies were unloaded along with passengers from the rail car. Inside the station, there were crates, still full of metal scrap ready for recycling, dropped like they were groceries as the base's former inhabitants evacuated the base after something HUGE made an equally large hole in the base's hull.

Their main modular room had the entire roof ripped off like a sardine cover, despite the extreme pressure keeping it from being peeled off. Whatever ripped the roof off was unfathomably strong, and as I heard a new, deafening roar from a large chasm below the base, I knew I had to leave immediately. The chasm looked as though a massive creature had ripped the very earth open and crawled out to wreak havoc on those that dared come to its domain. With no time to ascend, I decided that I needed to hide immediately before I became leviathan food.

I hid in the base's hollow shell, turning the lights on the Explorer off and shutting down every non-essential system I could. At first, there was dead silence, and I didn't see anything emerge from the chasm in front of the base. Then I saw a massive arm reaching up out of the deep, brownish-orange with fiery orange photophores glowing all along its skin. The hand crashed down right in front of the base and dug into the rock before it, and another arm reached up and slammed down on the other side of the chasm as a huge figure lifted himself out of the breach, like a kaiju straight out of Pacific Rim. The roar reverberated throughout the entire ocean, and I saw 4 glowing orange eyes on its face and glowing photophores along its body.

As I saw the monstrosity's face, I realized that the Sea Dragon Leviathan had returned once more, and it had grown a lot. Its long, winding body ended in a huge group of various-sized tentacles, all lined with razor-sharp suckers, and some ending in claw-like gripping pads. It had fins on its arms and body, looking like a classic 50's horror movie swamp monster on steroids.

The Sea Dragon began patrolling around the base, looking for any intruders around the gutted base's skeleton. The Sea Dragon grabbed onto the lip of the wall I was hiding behind and peered into the room, lighting it up with orange light from its glowing, fiery eyes. I held my breath as if even the slightest exhalation could alert the Sea Dragon to my presence, and as the leviathan reluctantly moved on to another location, I peered out and got a good look at the monstrous beast. It was easily 400 feet long, probably closer to 500, and was like an underwater Godzilla.

Its jaws alone were 50 feet long, and its teeth were huge and curved, perfect for ripping and tearing flesh. As the teeth got closer to the rear of its mouth, they became closer together and shorter, as well as less curved. The rear teeth were probably for cracking open prey with shells, suggesting it fed on Reefbacks and crushed their shells and ate the soft, fleshy insides.

I saw no point in fighting a 500-foot apex predator that could kill the most well-armored creature in the ocean and eat it for breakfast, so as soon as I saw an opening, I gunned the Seamoth as fast as it could possibly go, leaving the Sea Dragon far behind. Even all the way near the Grassy Plateaus, I could still hear the bone-rattling, blood-chilling roar of the monstrous leviathan. I needed to get off this planet. And I needed to do it before the Sea Dragon Leviathan ripped me apart with a single finger. That night, for the first time since arriving on this planet, I broke down and cried. I cried myself to sleep, and I had no dreams that night. Only nightmares.


	30. Showdown, Part 1

I was on edge. After my brush with Death incarnate, I had a mental breakdown that night. The Sea Dragon Leviathan was coming for me, and at almost 500 feet in length, there was nothing I could do except pray for a miracle that never happened. When praying didn't work, I decided it was time to make my own miracles. I began setting up electric defenses around my base and the surrounding area, hoping that they were powerful enough to affect the Sea Dragon, but I knew it wouldn't be enough to stop him, no matter how high-voltage they were.

As I struggled to set up effective defenses, I realized that more drastic measures would have to be taken. I commenced design and construction of a massive exosuit for my exosuit- a giant suit of armor that I could dock my exosuit inside of and use to take on the Sea Dragon one-on-one. It was almost 200 feet tall, and had huge, powerful fists for delivering serious pain. Each knuckle had sharp spikes for dishing out extra damage, and hydraulic pistons in the forearms allowed for quick jabs without having to pull back for another punch. It consumed massive amounts of power, requiring ten power cells at once to run at full strength, and required lots of maintenance to stay in top shape, but nothing could damage it. I had studied Reefback tissue samples and managed to reproduce the material its back was made of into a more technology-friendly resource called a Chelonian Plate, which made the "Colossus" extremely durable.

For weapons, I had developed and installed a prototype electromagnetic artillery cannon that delivered a turbine-propelled, depleted uranium, magnetically-launched metal rod at extremely high speeds, but it depleted 50% of the Colossus' power reserves in order to power the magnets that launched the projectile forward. If I could get a clean shot at the Sea Dragon Leviathan, I could end the fight quickly. That was pretty much the only way to prevail against the Leviathan, and if I failed, that could be the end of my stay on Subnautica. When I was sure I had taken all precautionary measures, I continued exploring around for any possible places to fall back to in the event of a defeat. There was really nowhere to hide once the Sea Dragon had a bead on me. He was frighteningly fast for such a massive creature, and could use his tentacles to boost himself forwards at high speeds.

The worst case scenario was he killed me in combat, and the best scenario was that I used the rail-cannon to shoot down the Leviathan before he even arrived- a nigh-impossible shot if there ever was one. As the days went by, I failed to come up with any solutions to my conundrum. Finally, on the seventh day of waiting, I heard it. The distant scream of the Sea Dragon as he approached the site of the final battle.

I hit all the switches to activate the base defenses, and began uncoupling the charging cord from the Colossus and starting up the drive core, preparing it for the inevitable, titanic showdown. I docked the exosuit inside of the docking bay in the chest of the Colossus, and as the massive suit groaned to life, I took a thundering step forward. As the joints warmed up and began to become more limber, I began to take large strides, eventually breaking into a jog. I got in position on an over head cliff overlooking the Grassy Plateaus where the Sea Dragon was coming through, and lined up the best shot I could with the rail-cannon. I had a decent yet messy shot at his broadside as he swam, and with 98% energy, I only had enough for one shot. I tried to make it count, and as I fired, the kinetic energy missile streaked towards the Sea Dragon at the speed of sound. However, it created a massive disturbance in water pressure around it, and the Leviathan must have felt it, because he managed to dodge so that the KEM merely caused a flesh wound, and the Leviathan looked towards the sound of the shot as the soundwaves caught up to him, seeing me waiting for him like a massive sentinel on the cliff, ready for battle.

He pushed off of the ocean floor with his entire body, rocketing towards me at top speed, a plume of sand coming with him, and as he approached the zenith of his arc, the sand cloud dissipated and I saw his massive jaws beginning to open, ready to crush me. I backed up and got a running heard-start and leaped off of the cliff, and, in mid-jump, I reached back with my right fist and prepared to punch him full-on in the face as hard as I could. The turbines started up and boosted the punch forward, and as it connected with the side of the Sea Dragon's face, I saw the shockwave reverberating throughout its jaws, his skin shuddering and his jaw whipping to the side due to the sheer force of the punch. I knocked three gigantic teeth out of his mouth, and he began to bleed.

"Blood? So soon? C'mon you bastard! I've got lots more planned for you, you sonuvabitch!" I screamed at him. 96% power left. Plenty. As the Sea Dragon began recovering from my skull-rattling punch, I grabbed him in an iron-gripped bear hug, and hit the electrical defense system, draining 10% of my power reserves to shock the living daylights out of him. 86% power left. Everything was going just fine. I then let go and uppercut the Leviathan, his head whipping back as the punch connected with his chin. As he drifted backwards from the blow, I walloped him in the stomach with my left, then grabbed him in a headlock with my right arm and charged up the piston punch of my left arm. I then aimed right at his eyes and let the piston punch rip, the Sea Dragon shaking me off as he recoiled in agony. He began lashing out in my direction with his tentacles, and he hit my legs with one of his largest ones, tripping me onto the ground.

As I got to my knees, he grabbed me from behind and slammed the head of the Colossus int the ocean floor, each impact like hitting the ground after jumping off of a skyscraper. He then raised his fists in an attempt to slam down on my back, but as the blow came towards me, I turned the torso around and reached out with my arms, catching his fists and squeezing them with all my might, trying my best to crush every bone in his hands. The Sea Dragon recovered from his initial surprise and headbutt the Colossus, causing me to lose my grip just enough for him to free his hands and get out of my reach.

As the sun began to set, I knew it was time to fall back to my forward operating base, a wide base with spotlights on each section, illuminating possible dangers and systematically searching the dark for intruders. I stood ever-vigilant in front of the base with the Colossus' high-intensity floodlights lighting up the increasingly dark waters before me. I activated the sonar ping, not wanting to find out too late that the Sea Dragon could camouflage or something like that.

"Hostile life form 100 meters from your current location and closing." Karen chimed as a massive sonar signature showed up on the scope. "Let him come." I responded solemnly. "Let the bastard come. I'm waiting for him." Suddenly, the spotlights on the base focused their beams and pointed into the blackness at the Leviathan as he charged, extremely pissed. "Finally..."

I began taking huge strides forward, eventually breaking into a run, and I pushed off of the ocean floor with my hydraulic legs as I approached the Sea Dragon's sonar signature. I just hoped that it was enough to beat him in this epic clash of titans. It was now or never.


	31. Showdown, Part 2

I rocketed towards the Sea Dragon Leviathan in my Colossus exosuit, and as we collided, my suit's superior weight overtook the Leviathan's strength, tackling him out of mid-jump. I then spun him around over my shoulder and pitched him like a giant baseball down towards the hard, jagged ocean floor beneath us. I could hear a few bones snap as he hit the ground, but despite taking a massive hit, the battle was far from over.

81% power remaining. "I could do this all night. How about you?" I sarcastically asked the Leviathan, now practically shaking with undying hatred and rage as I jumped down into the pit where he landed. I curb-stomped him into the ground with the Colossus' huge feet and massive weight, crushing some ligaments and cracking a couple more bones. The Sea Dragon then grabbed me by the legs and used his muscular tentacles to slam me into a nearby wall head-first.

As I recovered and got my bearings, I looked around and saw the Sea Dragon leaping straight at my chest, and as he wrapped his tentacles around my shoulders and upper arms, I strained to free myself from his iron grip. I hit the electrical defense system again, making him release me as his muscular system began convulsing from receiving a barrage of electrical signals from his nerves as I fried his nervous system with one million amps of electricity in a single one-megawatt burst. 68% power remaining. "That all you got?" I asked.

The Sea Dragon roared in frustration as the fatigue of getting the snot beaten out of him began to settle in, and he realized that he couldn't beat me one-on-one, not after I had given myself such a substantial head-start by ambushing him. He retreated into the shadows, and I scrambled to reactivate my sonar ping to get a bead on him again. He was heading towards my forward operating base, tearing it to pieces, but he could sense that the power leading to that base was coming from another location: my central home base. He began tracing the signature back to the source, and I activated my boosters, racing back to protect my base and my family. Luckily, Shawn had evacuated the Stalker family, taking them into the Shuttlebug caves for safe-keeping, and I had released all my aquarium fish in the event that my base was destroyed.

The Sea Dragon had no leverage to use against me, but I heard a familiar scream as Diablo came in to try and fight off the Sea Dragon. The Sea Dragon swiped at him viciously, but Diablo narrowly dodged the blow and bit into one of his fingers with his steel trap of a mouth, crushing the bone with his unbelievably strong jaws. The Leviathan roared in intense pain as his finger was rendered useless, and pain shot up through his hand and arm as Diablo twisted and ripped out a large chunk of meat, hitting a vein and spilling what seemed gallons of blood into the water around the Grassy Plateaus.

I heard the tell-tale screech of Biter Fish, and this time, there were more than I'd ever seen in one place. The smell of a new type of creature's blood flowing throughout the immediate area drove the Biters wild, driving them into an all-out feeding frenzy, and their instincts took over as their fear of the Sea Dragon subsided and was replaced with intense, burning hunger for flesh. They began swarming the Leviathan, ganging up in certain places, trying to break the skin, and eventually, they did, reaching the juicy, untouched meat within. He began swiping at swarms of Biters, and in the confusion, Diablo latched onto the Leviathan's snout.

As I watched on helplessly, the Sea Dragon threw back his head, throwing Diablo off of him, and closed his jaws around him as he crushed him in a single bite. The last thing I saw on Diablo's face as the teeth closed down around him was... peace. Diablo seemed to finally be at peace with his surroundings, knowing he had made up for attacking me when I first encountered him. *Now we're even.* His face seemed to say. And then he was gone.

The Sea Dragon then turned his head towards me, glaring at me in satisfaction as he swallowed what remained of my fallen ally, staring into my eyes, waiting to watch the sadness take over. Instead of sadness, however, eternal anger I'd kept bottled up since I got to this planet took over and overwhelmed my brain with raw, pure hatred. I screamed at him, cursing the monster's name and swearing vengeance for Diablo, my lost enemy-turned-friend, and charging in to finish the fight once and for all.

I grabbed his left arm and put my foot up to his side, pulling his arm as hard as I could, and I tore his arm off slowly and painfully, enjoying every second of ripping the arm off of my greatest and most hated enemy, ligaments popping and muscles tearing as the arm dislocated and eventually popped out of its socket, tearing free from his shoulder, causing the Leviathan excruciating pain like he had never imagined possible. "That's how it felt when you killed Diablo you BASTARD." I hissed furiously. I then grabbed him by the jaws and hyper-extended them, muscles ripping and bones snapping as I folded his jaws backward, then ripped his head in half by pulling the jaws in opposite directions. I continued to pull, eventually ripping the bastard's entire body in half, dropping it at my feet before dropping to my knees.

Finally, it was over, as his mangled and motionless body laid on the ocean floor for the last time. I had won. But I had lost so much to do so. I had lost my home during the battle, my base now ruins and scraps of metal. I had lost my ally and friend Diablo, who bravely helped defend my home, for all the good it did. I had even lost my innocence and my humanity, having ripped my enemy in half down the middle in my bloodthirsty rage.

Was it truly worth it? Could I have done things differently? So many questions, so few answers. And even if I did have answers, they didn't matter. Diablo was gone. My home was gone. My innocence was scattered like the wreck of the Aurora, which came into view as the sun began to rise and hit my face, assuring me that it wasn't the end of the world, but the beginning of a new age. The age of man.

END...

OF PART 1


	32. Aftermath

PLANET-25367 AKA SUBNAUTICA.

3 MONTHS AFTER OPERATION: LANCELOT.

THE GRASSY PLATEAUS.

It had been months since the fall of the king of the ocean. The Sea Dragon Leviathan, a 500-foot super-predator, had been taken down by me in a 200-foot mech suit called the Colossus. It had cost me dearly, losing a close friend, a Boneshark that I had saved named Diablo, my home base, and my innocence as my rage overcame me and I ripped the Leviathan in half, murdering him in a blind fury. I had recovered the rest of my family from the Shuttlebug caves near my former home base and rebuilt, never disturbing the ruins of my former dwelling, planting a flag in the center of the debris with a Boneshark color on it in honor of my fallen friend. In the nearby Grassy Plateaus, there lay the 500-foot skeleton of the monstrous nightmare known as the Sea Dragon, now thoroughly picked over a dozen times by Biter Fish and other opportunistic carnivores. I decided to leave the bones right where I had left his body three months prior, as a reminder that even the biggest of tyrants could fall from grace when they crossed paths with me and my family.

Shawn the Shocker was now 15 feet long and very strong, and Steve the Stalker was now 4 feet in length, half that of both his father Stanley and his mother Stella. I had rebuilt my base in the Grassy Plateaus, on a ridge overlooking the location of the epic battle of two terrifying combatants, nature vs. man, freedom vs. oppression, a clash of titans for the history books if there ever was one.

By then, I had started writing a journal to keep track of all my accomplishments and adventures on this planet, hoping that one day, someone would come to this planet and read the tales of my survival within its pages, and be inspired to persevere when all hope seemed lost, to succeed where others had failed, and to survive against all odds, just as I had so many times before on this planet. There was nothing on Subnautica that could keep me down for long, but not everything on this planet knew it. There was also the mystery of the beings that William Tholguud spoke of in his PDA messages and recordings, claiming that they sent the Sea Dragon after him and his fellow survivors.

If he was correct, then that meant there was a higher power at work here, and that they were hiding something in the Lava biome where the Sea Dragon had dwelled before I destroyed him. That's why whoever got too close or went too deep was killed- the mystery beings didn't want anyone to see what they had down there. I HAD to find out. There could be sentient alien life on this planet! Or maybe the Alterra Science Corporation was hiding something here... I was going to figure what just what the hell was going on on this god-forsaken planet. And I would record it all in the journal. THIS is that journal. This is the journal that will reveal... THE TRUTH!


	33. Comeback

My ridge-based home was new and improved over the last one. It was positioned quite a bit deeper than my forest base had been, but thankfully was still on the edge of a Creepvine Forest for the Stalkers, and the wide open spaces made it so that nothing could hide near my base without me knowing.

At first, I thought that predators could hide on the cliff face below me in wait for an opportune moment to ambush me, but I decided that a vertical portion of the base, built into the cliff face with a few windows showing through the rocky surface, would be a nice touch, and the bottom section of the massive drop-off would be perfect for housing the Colossus in its hangar bay, which was about sixty-eight-and-a-half meters tall. Its comfortably fit the sixty-one-meter-tall mech suit just right, allowing me to access all sides and surfaces I needed to, while also successfully hiding the entire Colossus behind the biggest airlock I could build.

Luckily, it was just big enough to fit the Colossus without too much trouble. The Colossus had taken weeks to design and construct, and the crude version I used in the Leviathan fight was made obsolete after the battle ended. It was no longer of use to me, other than if I wanted to go into Reaper territory and dig around for resources. There were no more Sea Dragon Leviathans hunting me down 'til the ends of the earth, no new ultra-predators challenging me for dominance, no massive, doom-bringing threats that I could punch into submission.

I had gotten in a few fights back in college, and gained a reputation for being quite the bruiser around campus. I had some issues with my friends, with them becoming a bit cautious and withdrawn from me. When I went a guidance counselor for help, I had told him that there was a problem I couldn't punch my way out of. "You'll find that most dilemmas are of that nature." he replied solemnly yet simultaneously jokingly, with small smile and a sarcastic look in his eyes. These became words to live by for me, and from then on, I looked for ways to resolve my problems by taking them on with my mind before I resorted to my fists. My counselor's words echoed around in my head every time a dilemma came up during my stay on Subnautica, and, save for the Sea Dragon, the Sandcrab, and the occasional Reaper, I managed to solve all my problems by using non-violent methods.

Instead of constantly hunting down fish for food, I grew my own plants for consumption, and instead of initially driving predators such as the Stalkers from their natural habitat, I had found a way to coexist with them. Therefore, the Colossus was more of a souvenir and reminder of that fateful day three months ago. Instead of dwelling in the past, I began to work towards the future. Using some tech salvaged from the Aurora, I learned how to make core processors for Karen.

I had an entire modular room lined with processors and CPU's, adding to Karen's processing power. This allowed her to assist me in the field by tapping into the processors back at home base. With enhanced scanners built into all my gear, Karen could assist me in an unprecedented capacity, able to constantly run diagnostics on all my equipment at regular intervals, monitor my vital signs, and keep tabs on the base and my "family", all at the same time! When it came to scanning for resources, I had to get some sort of more complicated scanner system to reach out and detect them. I went to a wreck near the Koosh biome and went inside, finding lots of cargo containers full of supplies, some food stale, some not, some water still good, other bottles not so much, some power cells, and quite a few batteries. What I found outside of the wreck was a few fragments of a broken Scanner Room.

The Scanner Room allowed me to scan for nearby resources within a 50 meter radius, with a wall screen that allowed me to select what resource to look for. I could look for quartz, salt, scrap metal, limestone and other resource nodes, lithium, and any other materials nearby,and with a chip upgrade in the Scanner Room's upgrade panel, I could send the locations of these resources straight to my HUD for easy acquisition. The Scanner Room also came with two camera drones by default, both having limited energy, but being rechargeable back at one of the Scanner Room's two charging stations.

The cameras were mainly for scouting out areas of potential danger due to their small size and unassuming appearance. They were very small and quite fast, meaning they were most predators' last choice for food due to being hard to catch and not very tasty-looking. Another upgrade that I couldn't get to work quite yet was an upgrade that linked the Scanner Room to the Cyclops and installed scanners to allow for mobile scanning. Linking the onboard scanners with the Scanner Room database was proving more difficult than originally anticipated, so it wasn't working quite yet.

It wasn't exactly my main priority, with that honor going to upgrading my Cyclops in terms of speed and power efficiency. Sensory upgrades would come later. I found a few Cyclops pressure compensator module fragments in the Mushroom Forest, and made 2 more, increasing the USS Mayflower's crush depth to a whopping 900 meters, with the other two upgrade module slots belonging to the power efficiency module and the scanner system module, although it doesn't work yet.

The next order of business was to troubleshoot to fix the scanner system, and an inspection of the external scanners indicated that the wiring was faulty at increased depths, so I encased each scanner in a thin enameled glass dome to allow for pressure resistance while also allowing for clear scans. I could now use one of the status monitors to select which resources to scan for. I was hoping to link the camera drones to the Mayflower as well, but that was much more complicated than I was willing to deal with, and I realized that without a second person to control the cameras, it really wouldn't be that useful. However, that doesn't mean the USS Mayflower couldn't use some external cameras...

I began to hook up cameras on various surfaces around the Cyclops' body, one below the cockpit, near the access hatch, to make sure that I was able to exit and enter the hatch, and not blocked by some structure or the sea floor. It helped avoid collisions as well. The ventral surface of the Cyclops' tail was another area for a camera, this time being on a ball joint to allow for looking around to ensure the entire tail was clear of the sea floor and other obstructions. The last camera was based right in front of the bay doors for the Seamoth docking bay, to make sure that nothing was blocking the bay doors from opening, as well as making sure the Seamoth would fit between the sea floor and the Cyclops safely. This camera could be raised on a telescoping camera mount that allowed the camera to be repositioned to more accurately judge how wide the gap between the sea floor and Cyclops was.

Whenever I went to a more dangerous biome, such as a dangerous lava area, found at the end of a huge Deep Grand Reef tunnel, I docked the Exosuit inside of the USS Mayflower instead of the USS Explorer, the exosuit being more resilient to every type of damage than any Seamoth ever could be. Most of the Lava biome was inactive, with only a few small pockets of lava still flowing and cooling down quickly after touching water. As I explored further, more and more pools and rivers of lava were active, and I saw on the digital thermometer on my HUD that it was over 30 degrees Celsius around here, the most efficient temperature for thermal power plants. I placed seven thermal plants, each one near a pool or river of active lava, but not too close, and made power relays back to my base. It generated lots of power units for my base and was environmentally friendly as well as renewable, probably the best choice for power on the planet.

I obtained the blueprints for the thermal plant from a wreck near the Underwater Islands, that had a few partially-intact thermal plants that I scanned and used to complete the partial blueprint I gained from damaged files downloaded from the Aurora. The power relay was found at the Underwater Islands wreck as well, and was made with one gold chunk, one titanium, and one quartz, and was constructed via a Builder tool. Now that my base had over two thousand units of power available at one time, I could afford to build pipes to transport a variety of materials. Their main purpose was to transport oxygen from the surface, and the bigger, powered pipes I was building could transport extra oxygen as well as items, water, and other matter. It could even connect to lockers and other storage containers.

I didn't get into the whole storage thing, knowing it would almost certainly be confusing, but I did hook up pipes to my nuclear reactor. I had studied the reactor and found that it leaked small amounts of radiation without proper shielding, and the only way to provide said shielding was to convert it into a modular room module. I built a new modular room on the side of my new base that was closest to the entrance to the Jellyshroom Caves, and hooked up my industrial pipes into the uranium deposit box, so that when I found uranium in the Jellyshroom Caves, I could drop it into the inbox for the pipe's transport system, press a button, and send it to the reactor for nuclear reaction and energy production.

I had a pretty good life for being the sole survivor of a crash-landing on an alien, ocean-covered planet. But it wouldn't last, no matter how much I wanted it to. I had the luck of a man who stepped on and broke a mirror while walking under a ladder, came across a black cat right after that, and opened my umbrella inside once I got to my destination. And changing planets didn't change that.


	34. Discovery

My three-month streak of good fortune ended with the discovery of a new biome connected to the Inactive Lava biome that was adjacent to the Deep Grand Reef biome. It was a very strange biome, being seemingly impossible at first; it was an underwater river, which made no sense at first, but I quickly remembered that such a thing was actually possible, and actually happened on Earth sometimes as well.

The "water" in the river was actually a briny substance that was more dense than water, to the point where it settled on the ocean floor, and the rock that made up the bottom of this biome was slowly dissolved by the briny substance to form a large river of sorts. Unlike back on Earth, some life actually lived in these rivers of brine, with plants too dense to float in water living on the top of the brine, being slightly less dense than the brine it floated in. It resembled a lilypad from above, but it had no stem connecting it to the bottom of the river, meaning it was entirely free-floating. These plants somewhat looked like flattened lily flowers, with petal-like designs on the top of them. They glowed a soft blue or green, sometimes gradually turning from one to the other, and they floated in loose congregations in the slightly-glowing, frothy, sea-green brine of the river.

In some areas, where the river split off and came to a dead end, the brine pooled up into a small, placid lagoon of sorts, with stringy, coral-shaped plants growing from the depths of the brine, most just barely breaking the "surface" by a foot or two, with the occasional over-achiever reaching up to four or five feet high above the placid pool of brine. From what I could see, there were no actual animals dwelling in any of the rivers, but near them, there was plenty of life, and most of it was dangerous.

One of the most dangerous was a long, spiny eel with a horrific face not even a mother could love, and its attitude was almost as bad as its looks implied. Its head was a brownish-red, with blank, glowing yellowish-red eyes the rest of its body after the head tapered down to a pointed tail, and all along the ventral and dorsal surfaces were spinal vertebrae, easily visible along with the rest of the eel's innards through a transparent, ghostly blue layer of skin. The spines jutted out like the vertebrae of a starving animal, but even more so, and on its transparent body, behind the head, it had four trailing sensory organs, similar to that of a gourami back on Earth, with each one being on a corner of the circumference of the so-called "Spine Eel's" body.

While the whole eel was 12 feet from nose to tail, the feelers started about 2 to 3 feet behind its nose, just after the red face turned to blue body, and each one was 4 feet long. I didn't know what their purpose was, but perhaps it was to sense nearby prey or predators behind them. The Spine Eel's unhinging jaws had long, crooked teeth that faced forward and curved a bit, and as each set got further back in its jaws, they got more and more straight up and down, and the teeth, more like fangs than anything, were so large and curvy that all Spine Eels had trouble closing their mouth without accidentally jamming at least one of their foot-long dagger-like teeth into their gums. Instead of keeping their mouths closed, they swim along with their jaws slightly agape, giving them an ever-present sneer that also doubled to scare of potential predators. When the Spine Eel was aggravated, it unhinged its jaws and let out a scream that gave the Boneshark a run for its money. Its eating habits and methods were similar to that of a snake's, using its large teeth to catch prey and keep it from escaping, then swallowing its prey whole, unhinging its jaws for bigger prey when necessary. This made it a vicious predator that was not to be trifled with, and always to be approached with caution, if ever approached at all.

The rest of the biome was almost as equally terrifying as the Spine Eel, with a massive, 230-foot long rib cage with a huge skull at one end. Each rib jutted out of the substrate like a giant, spindly crab leg. None of the bones matched or even came close to any of the bones of the creatures I had encountered so far, and I never found a match for it in the future, either. I realized that it was a lost relic from another time, and some of the other fauna down in the river seemed to be almost dinosaur-like, such as a moldy-looking, different-colored Boneshark with growths on it and even more primitive armor-plating on its body, being very heavy and very bulky. It was like a less-evolved Boneshark, left behind and forgotten by evolution, left in a primitive form forever. The entire biome reeked of ancient secrets long-lost to the rest of the world, and I suddenly found the perfect name for the area: The Lost River.

The Lost River ran all over the planet, having very hard-to-spot entrances all over the nearby area, with at least one in almost every biome outside of the Safe Shallows and Creepvine Forests, with the entire river flowing underneath the entirety of the continent, allowing for easy access to all different areas, if "traversing a super-creepy biome full of deadly, terrifying, mysterious predators that seemed to always be hungry for human flesh" was considered "easy access", that is. The Lost River Shark, which was the Dino-Boneshark's name, was one of the only creatures I ever saw "swimming" in the Lost River's briny liquid, but only for limited amounts of time. It usually waited for other life forms, such as Spadefish, to come and intake excess salt by taking a "sip" of briny river, and the shark would burst from the thick, murky brine and snap its prey up in its powerful jaws.

The shark's heavier plating meant that it could spend quite a while submerged in the super-salty brine without becoming dehydrated, making it so that the evolution that its cousin, the Boneshark, had gone through would've been a disadvantage for the Lost River Shark in its natural habitat. While these two were the only excessively hostile predators in the Lost River, there were more that I had simply yet to discover that were a bit more docile, but equally as terrifying as the first two, if not more so.


	35. River of the Lost

My discovery of the Lost River biome seemed to kickstart a chain of minor events that led to the emerging of some new creatures across the continent I lived in. A new creature that resembled a cross between a squid, a crab, and a jellyfish was the first animal to come out of hibernation and take to the ocean currents. It had a large, squishy, glowing, transparent head membrane, with 2 pairs of beady eyes on it, and a harder, transluscent head inside of the squishy membrane. Instead of tentacles, it had a variety of different-sized crab-like arms with small pincers for grabbing at the end of each one. They weren't very thick or bulky, each one being made for walking on the ocean floor or propelling the "Crabsquid" forward in open waters instead of pinching or crushing predators or prey.

However, its unique physiology held a secret form of self-defense, one whose origin I've still been unable to pinpoint exactly. It has something to do with its internal organs being able to create a shockwave around the Crabsquid's body that blasts away enemies and stuns its prey. Crabsquids are mostly defensive, and switch from walking on the ocean floor to swimming around like jellyfish when necessary. They made interesting clicking and chirping sounds to communicate, meaning they were intelligent, but they preferred to be left alone by other creatures. Another odd creature that wasn't exactly triggered by my presence, but nonetheless appeared for the first time shortly after I discovered the Lost River was a fascinating creature I dubbed the "Sea Treader", due to its enormously long legs and penchant for constantly roaming the ocean floor, travelling via Sea Treader "paths" to different areas.

There was actually such a path in the Danger Reef, and it spiraled up the large mountainous ridge that dominated the biome, leading to a natural land-bridge connecting to a massive cave in the Deep Grand Reef, where the wide open sandy plains of the tunnel were covered in long-forgotten Sea Treader tracks, indicating that they used said path frequently, most likely a migratory path. It lead to the Dunes, which were perfect conditions for a super-tall walking giant with low mobility. Its legs could move a bit, but with only three segments and only three legs, it couldn't keep any of its legs off the ground for very long due to the risk of losing its balance and collapsing. Its main method of defense was to raise up on its back legs and poke at its enemies with its front leg, which was directly connected to its face. On either side of its face were long feelers meant for sensing predators. The end of its front leg was actually a mouth that could rummage in the sand of the paths they travelled, and every once in a while the trails were barren of food, so they would make the perilous journey to the Dunes to find more food.

The journey was dangerous, with Reaper Leviathans ambushing them along the way, especially on the Danger Reef mountain path, where Reapers had an obvious advantage, being able to come back for multiple attacks on the Sea Treaders as they tried to maneuver the narrow, dangerous path, prone to falling to their deaths if caught off-balance. It was fascinating to watch them, although they moved quite slowly, meaning that watching them move from place to place was a very slow process, but periodically checking in on them was very interesting, to see how far they've gotten and how may Sea Treaders have joined the pod since the last check-in. Apparently, the fall and the end of summer were months where the Sea Treaders knew there wasn't any food on their sandy trails, so they spent the end of the summer and all of the fall in the Dunes, risking attacks by Reapers in order to have enough food to support themselves. They were quite majestic creatures, and admiring them when they weren't under attack was amazing, observing their blue and orange blotching patterns and listening to their whale-like cries as separate pods called to each other.

The Crabsquids, wanting to explore outside of the Lost River biome, would jump into the early winter currents and be wisked away by them, usually landing in one of the Grand Reef areas, but I've also seen Crabsquids in the Blood Kelp Forest, the Koosh biome, the Sparse Reef, and a couple jumping around between Underwater Islands on occasion. There wasn't a huge number of Crabsquids, so it wasn't really an infestation or invasion, but more like an introduction. Crabsquids fit into most ecosystems pretty well, feeding on scraps that other creatures didn't want and only hunting down their own prey when other food was unavailable. Usually, this meant smaller fish such as Spadefish and other bottom-dwellers, sometimes even blasting and fighting Sandsharks for their prey, and Crabsquids rarely showed up in the Grassy Plateaus, meaning their exposure to Sandsharks was rare. Other than that, Crabsquids didn't conflict very much with other life forms. Sometimes, a random Boneshark in the Underwater Islands would get brave and attack a Crabsquid, but the Boneshark would always get blasted back into its place on the food web with a quick shockwave from the Crabsquid's blast organ. Stalkers didn't really see Crabsquids very often, if ever, but when they did, they knew enough to leave them alone. Fortunately, the Crabsquid was the only Lost River resident that liked to leave the biome via swimming and riding currents, but not the only one that could. There was another, mysterious denizen of the Lost River that could leave in the blink of an eye- literally.


	36. Warpers

The most unique and mysterious inhabitant of the Lost River was known as a "Warper", named for its ability to rip open the fabric of reality and create a doorway to another location in space, which could "warp" matter that passed through it to the other side of the "portal" instantly, mainly the Warper itself. However, before the portals closed, other creatures could pass through them just as Warpers could. This was used for many things, from catching prey to escaping predators, or just warping to join other Warpers to socialize or congregate to form migratory flocks.

Warpers could also shoot a ball of green teleportation energy at their enemies that were too fast for the Warper to teleport away from, which teleported the target about 100 feet in the direction the ball was travelling upon impact. For more persistent enemies, the Warper could charge up a larger blue ball of energy thatteleported targets 3 times further than the green ball, but essentially worked the same way the green one did; it encapsulated the target in teleportation energies as the ball moved forward, and once the target was fully enveloped in energy, it warped them in the direction that the energy was travelling until the energy dissipated and it spat the target out violently, disorienting it while tearing at its body as it threatened to overload the target body's atoms with temporal energies. The Warper's portals didn't work the same way, instead steadily spreading out its temporal energies evenly throughout the teleporting being's atoms, making sure not to overload them and safely transporting all of them through space to the other location.

The Warper was a unique creature indeed, and its appearance reflected that perfectly. It had a crab-like mouth and an odd, frilled carapace for a head,and its entire body was dark shades of purple and violet, and it had 2 spindly, crab-like arms that ended in points, each one being lined with miniature temporal energy-producing organs to allow the Warperto blast the orbs of temporal energy from its forceps-like arms. Its arms and face almost made it resemble a praying mantis, but the rest of its body made it much different-looking.

Its body resembled a long, flowing cloak that ended in two tentacle-like flaps in the back, that complimented the Warper's three, long tentacles coming from the bottom of its abdomen. The front of its midsection was see-through and had a bluish-purple tint to it, and inside the Warper's body were visible organs, such as a heart, complete with thick, oddly-colored arteries, a stomach, and some other organs, one of which glowed a soft green color right before the Warper opened a portal or shot a green warping orb, and it turned to a soft blue when it was about to shoot a blue warping orb, or, in rare instances when Warpers needed to jump entire biomes at a time, when it created a portal with a blue border of temporal energy holding the doorway open. The Warper only did this when its usual portal and both of its energy orbs failed to deter or help it escape from predators, but when Warpers used their blue portal, it sent them a little over half a mile away, or about one kilometer in metric. Warpers could only do this once, sometimes twice, before having to recuperate from the strain using vast amounts of temporal energy at once placed on their body.

Warpers almost never used this ability, the only times I ever saw it being used in natural situations being when they ventured into Reaper territory and all other measures failed, and, even more rarely, when a Warper needed to escape from a large group of predators, such as a swarm of piranha-like Biter Fish or a family of angry Bonesharks. Both were fast enough to eventually catch the less agile Warper unless it warped out of their line of sight and the range of the rest of their senses. Due to their ability to escape from all forms of danger, Warpers rarely fell prey to any type of predator, but when it came to their diet, almost anything they could get their mandibles on was fair game. They used their abilities to catch a variety of fish, such as Hoopfish, Hoverfish, Peepers, Boomerangs, Reginalds, Holefish, Garryfish, Oculus, Eyeyes, even Airsacks if they were feeling desperate enough to settle for the mostly flesh-less body of an Airsack, and, if they were feeling brave or were sufficiently stupid, they even preyed on lone Biter Fish, often not getting to finish their meal due to the fallen Biter's friends usually being nearby to interrupt the consumption of their friend's body.

Warpers were ruthless when it came to pretty much everything, and were intelligent enough to realize that due to their abilities, they could actually afford to be as ruthless as they wanted without consequence. However, when I came by, they left me the hell alone, knowing the hard way that when shot at, I could shoot back with a dangerous projectile of my own: a vortex torpedo. Warpers got a taste of their own medicine with the vortex formed from on eof my torpedoes, being sucked in and flung into the open ocean at high speeds, having no say in the matter and being too disoriented to warp themselves out of the vortex's range of suction.

They didn't mess with the Cyclops either, knowing that the torpedo-launching Explorer was waiting inside to deploy and fire back should the Mayflower come under attack. Little did I know that the Warpers were more intelligent than any other creature native to Subnautica, and held the key to the answers to the questions I so desperately craved to have the answers to.


	37. Crabsquid Curiosity

Now that there were no 400-foot ultra-predators lurking around the Blood Kelp biome, I managed to muster the courage to venture there once more and investigate the abandoned seabase there. As I explored more in-depth, I discovered that the base's previous inhabitants had been studying resource conservation, because they had developed a couple of machines that allowed them to recharge their power sources. One was a charging station that could recharge up to four batteries simultaneously using the base's power grid, and the other was able to recharge two power cells at the same time, also using the base's power grid.

This allowed me to not waste time, effort, and resources crafting new batteries and power cells, and it also meant that I didn't have to pollute the ocean by disposing of my dead batteries and power cells. Instead, I could recharge them at the cost of a portion of my base's power. It was worth it, especially since I was big on environmental conservation, and always tried to refrain from doing anything that hurt any form of wildlife or the environment. The only exceptions were when wildlife wanted to hurt me, such as the Sea Dragon. Even that was a heart-wrenching experience, affecting me emotionally for weeks following the final battle, giving me vivid nightmares.

As I began the return journey back to my base with the charging stations' blueprints in my database, I was confronted by an exceptionally large Crabsquid with vivid markings and a strong glow to it, which had risen up from beneath the entrance as I approached, almost like an ambush. However, the Crabsquid merely inspected me closely, even gently holding onto me with a couple of its crab-like legs as it used its feelers, positioned around its mouth, to investigate my divesuit and how it tasted.

Apparently, Crabsquids don't like the taste of silicone rubber, because he recoiled his feelers in disgust upon tasting the rubber exterior of my divesuit. He then released me gently, and swam off to find a more suitable meal. I floated there in shock due to how close I had come to a potentially dangerous creature, surprised that it didn't blast me with its shockwave attack and ask questions later, but let it never be said that I wasn't grateful for its politeness!

Perhaps Crabsquids had big brains to go along with their large heads, and were smart enough to know that I wasn't a foe, and that if I didn't taste good, he didn't want to make an enemy out of me. I would need to investigate further, but the task at hand was to get back to my base to install the recharge stations I had recovered from the abandoned Blood Kelp base into my own base's power grid. After I finished installing the charging stations, I returned to the Blood Kelp biome to continue researching Crabsquid behavior.

On the way to the Blood Kelp biome, I found a hybrid biome of Underwater Islands and Blood Kelp, with suspended islands held aloft by jumbo Floaters, and tethered to each other via a different strain of Blood Kelp that could grow horizontally and plant itself into two islands at once, keeping them close to each other so long as the vine held. Crabsquid seemed noticably more abundant here, and were quite at home.

It was in the eerily serene Blood Kelp Islands biome that I first noticed the groans, clicks, and other unique sounds they made to communicate with one another. It was an oddly peaceful and calming song that had its ups and downs, not sounding quite right if you actually tried to listen, but as background noise and ambience, it was soothing and enjoyable. It helped keep me calm knowing that I was in the territory of multiple hostile and terrifying creatures, which seemed to be slightly fewer in number, probably due to competition from the newly-arrived Crabsquids. The lower threat level even made me so bold as to venture into a piece of wreckage I found bridging the gap between two Floater islands. Next to one of the exposed doorways, there was a sign that said "Biology Lab" on it, and I eagerly cut through the sealed door with my laser cutter, excited to finally get my hands on something that I was familiar working with.

My courage was rewarded with a variety of biology equipment, chief among them being a Specimen Analyzer for scanning organic matter more in-depth than a regular scanner could. The Species Analyzer opened up so many new options, from unlocking the secrets of the Reefback's insanely dense shell, to finding out how the Hoopfish created a low-density water pocket with its antennae. A chemical synthesizer hooked up to the Species Analyzer was no longer functioning, and pretty badly damaged, but my scanner managed to get just barely enough data for Karen to fill in the blanks and successfully add its blueprint into my databank. The Species Analyzer was in substantially better condition, and proved to be no problem to scan for replication.

The chemical synthesizer meant that, once hooked up to a Species Analyzer, it could synthesize almost any chemical scanned by the analyzer using materials from the surrounding environment and any on-hand elements that were readily available in the lab. If I scanned a Reefback DNA serum, I could synthesize it whenever I wanted using the synthesizer! I could even make adjustments where needed using the manual adjustment panel to tweak the chemical composition however I saw fit.

Of course, I never actually used Reefback DNA serums, since they tended to be detrimental to most creatures injected with any amount of the serum, with its purpose to be to increase the size of the injected creature, but instead deforms them, either internally or externally, sometimes both. Sometimes, the serum would cause the internal organs to grow but not the rest of the body, with the body not growing fast enough to keep up with the rapidly growing organs. Sometimes, the body would grow, but not the organs, making the creature unable to adequately provide for all of its bodily functions. Even if both grew at the same rate, there was still the problem of the growth serum tending to cause cancer in affected organisms.

I eventually abandoned the Reefback serum completely, and instead began studying the structure of the Reefback's shell so I could incorporate it into the Mayflower's hull and increase its crush depth. It took quite a while, however, with the start of my research being delayed due to a minor breach in the hull of the research wing of my base flooding the biolab and short-circuiting a large portion of my necessary equipment. I had to rebuild all of the ruined components, which took quite a while once I found out that the surge of electricity caused by the flooding had started a fire in one of the nuclear reactors, which I had to put out, then deconstruct and reconstruct the reactor all over again with mostly new parts. Then, to top it all off, on my second day of research, my nuclear reactors ran out of uranium without warning.

What I thought was random misfortune turned out to be my own inability to tear myself away from my research, with a message from Karen that the uranium supply was almost empty being silenced by me so that I could concentrate on my work. Without a secondary source of power, most of my work was lost in the power outage, due to me being pretty bad about saving my work at regular intervals. I was so into my work that I didn't even notice that the power indicator on my HUD was yellow, meaning that I was low on power, until it turned red and started flashing at zero.

I needed to get at least some auxiliary power back online before the life support system ran out of oxygen for myself and fresh water for my fish, so I ran to the hatch and exited the base, making a beeline for the roof of my base, where I placed a newly constructed solar panel to temporarily restore power to the base's primary functions. With night approaching, however, the solar panel wasn't going to be able to generate enough power to last me and my fish through the night, so I had to make a daring sunset trip to the Jellyshroom Caves.


	38. The Journey

My trek to the Jellyshroom Caves was one of the most dangerous trips I've ever taken to a biome, especially since by the time I got there, it was officially nighttime, meaning that all the aggressive lifeforms of the biome were extra hostile, being more willing to attack me from a distance, and their attitude was more ferocious. Upon arriving in the USS Explorer, I searched for basalt chunks by stopping by my miniature mining outpost and sent out a scanning pulse for basalt chunks from the outpost's scanner room, then using the HUD upgrade module that allowed me to see scanned resources on my HUD to track down basalt chunks, hoping that at least 6 of the 23 the scan had found held uranium chunks, with me having 2 nuclear reactors, and needing enough to last me a few days, with 2 chunks, one for each reactor, lasting me one day. I got a bit more than I bargained for, getting lucky and finding 10 uranium chunks, able to last me 5 days.

That was enough for a while, and I returned to the transport tube at the surface to deposit my uranium and return it to the reactors back at home base. I then shifted over to a new section of the Jellyshroom Caves, this time without a scanner room, and as I looked around for basalt chunks, I was disappointed to find only 3 uranium chunks, but I saw a nearby, large, hollow Jellyshroom. I cautiously approached the entrance to the trunk, knowing that a Crabsnake could come lashing out and gnashing its jaws at me, and sure enough, as I peered into the hollow trunk, I saw a 30-foot Crabsnake bolting towards me out of the trunk, grabbing me with its mandibles and taking a chunk out of my abdomen as its gnashing teeth grabbed onto my side and tore out a bit of my flesh. I screamed in agony, but there was no one to hear me scream under the sea.

As the Crabsnake was occupied by the meal (GROSS) it had in its jaws, I managed to grab my diamond-edged knife and slashed at its face, carving a chunk out of its head as restitution for taking a chunk of mine. The hole left by the Crabsnake's bite wasn't too severe, but if I left it exposed to the ocean's salty water, it would keep bleeding, so I needed to get somewhere where I could clean the wound and stop the bleeding. Until then, the wound hurt worse than anything I'd ever felt in my entire life.

By the time I weakly swam back to the Explorer, I was starting see darkness around the edges of my vision, on the edge of blacking out from blood loss. I scrambled inside and struggled to pull down the emergency medkit from the ceiling of the cockpit, fumbling with the bandages and medicine inside as I began shivering due to hypothermia beginning to set in, with my suit being breached and cold water flowing in and coming into contact with my skin, chilling me to the bone. I turned up the heat in the Seamoth, gradually, to prevent heat shock, and once my shivering calmed down, I carefully applied the bandages to stop the bleeding, making sure to medicate them to help accelerate the healing process. I turned down all the non-essential systems after moving closer to an empty Jellyshroom, and just sat there watching the fish swim by, with a school of Oculus slowly passing in front of the Explorer's cockpit. One even came up and peered into the glass bubble, illuminating the interior with its soft, violet light emanating from its eye.

As the pain began to subside, I moved further toward the front, looking upwards and seeing a field of Jellyrays above me, with their long, glowing, flowing fins trailing behind them as they gracefully flapped their "wings" and swam through the water, collecting plankton, zooplankton, and other microorganisms in their "mouths" as they swam along, taking in water through the numerous intake openings on the sides of their ventral surfaces and filtering out anything that could be used as food.

The Jellyshrooms' spores made extra-nutritious food for Jellyrays, and with it being early spring, the Jellyshrooms were releasing their spores just in time for the prime growing season. Sometimes, the larger Jellyshrooms would have a build-up of spores that Jellyrays stayed near, waiting for the flood of spores to release and greedily slurping them up as they were expunged from the Jellyshroom's cystidia en masse, making for an intense feeding frenzy, as intense as the slow-moving Jellyrays could be, anyway.

Eventually, the soothing light of the Jellyshrooms and the local fauna combined with the fatigue of my body mending the wound to my abdomen made me drift into unconsciousness. In my dream, I was free-floating around in a biome I didn't recognize at first, but I realized it was the Black Castle from William Thorguud's Sea Dragon recording.

From behind the Castle emerged a large creature, even larger than the Sea Dragon, that loosely resembled it in body shape and some of its features. The main differences were its arms, which ended in scythe-shaped flippers, its bioluminescence, which was blue with 2 stalks on its head that were tipped with yellow-green photophores, a more unique head shape, being more stout and having teeth built into its jaws, which were built into the creature's shell-like skin. It had the same tentacles, and was a brownish color with blue photophores along its body, and as the monstrosity emerged from behind the Black Castle in the Active Lava Biome, it climbed on top of it, the setting changing to resemble the mountainous ridge where my base was built, with the leviathan roaring at the top of his lungs (gills?) with a sound that reverberated through my very soul.

It sat triumphant over the rubble of what was once my base, the entire thing destroyed, with dead Stalkers everywhere, my Cyclops crushed in half by one of its tentacles, with the mysterious monstrosity claiming the title as king of the ocean, emperor of the sea. Then I woke up from my nightmare, just trying to focus on returning to base with the uranium I had, to continue my Reefback research. After a few more days, I had cracked the secrets of the Reefback's shell and managed to incorporate into my Cyclops hull, as well as the shell of my Colossus suit. The entire time, I couldn't stop thinking about my nightmare and what I saw in it.

I dubbed the creature in my dream the "Sea Emperor", and I vowed that if it was a real thing, that I would never let it commit the atrocity I saw in my nightmare. My home would be preserved. My "family" would remain unharmed. Stanley, Stella, and Steve would The possibility of failing was my worst fear, and the conductors of the original nightmare knew exactly how to capitalize on it. Little did I know that I was being set up for a fall. Whoever the masterminds behind it were, they were taking their time, and whatever they were planning, it was meant to spell the end for my time on this planet. THEIR planet.


	39. Death of the Dream, Part 1

My dream. My vision. My future. My present. All of it came crashing down all at once. The plan of the mysterious manipulators in the shadows had been set in motion, and they were always one step ahead of me. First, there were unnatural earthquakes ripping open cracks in some of the deep-sea biomes, leading down to the Lava Zone, with new, terrifying creatures emerging from them.

One I called the Lava Lizard, because of its close resemblance to lizards back on Earth and its affinity for lava, with its thick, green hide protecting it and allowing it to sleep, rest, and hibernate inside magma when necessary. They were completely blind, with amazing hearing that could even sense changes in water pressure, making absolute motionlessness their only weakness.

They had a split bottom jaw, with forward-facing fangs, like tusks, sticking out of the end of its jaws, that doubled as a sieve for rummaging in the substrate and catching invertebrates. They were fast, aggressive predators, and they were almost as smart as Stalkers, albeit much nastier, showing no interest in making friends or allies, which I found out the hard way when on almost chomped my arm off when I cautiously offered it a Peeper to eat.

Another lava creature that emerged from the molten depths was called a Lava Larva. I wasn't actually sure whether or not it was another creature's larva, but it looked pretty much the same as an adult as it does when it's an adolescent. They weren't inherently hostile, but loved to latch onto metallic surfaces and munch on the metal coating with its sucker-like mouth, which was lined with tough, blunt teeth made for crushing and digging into hard surfaces. It loved to chew into the USS Mayflower, the USS Explorer, and my home base.

They were a dark purple, with two forward-facing lobes that gave it the false appearance of having a terminal, forward-facing mouth, when instead, it was on its ventral surface, making it easy to hide its silhouette against whatever it was attached to. This made it hard to find them to scrape off, and their exoskeleton's tough material made it very hard to penetrate, meaning I had to scrape them off, usually taking a chunk of metal along with it due to the Larva's strong teeth being dug into the metal very firmly.

I thought using my laser cutter or my hypobaric welder on their shells would burn the little bastards into letting go, but I should've known that a creature from the Lava Zone would be immune to heat damage. To combat these new threats, I developed a thermal gun, or thermgun, which I could use to change the temperature of a certain area of water, making creatures that didn't like the temperature change to vacate the area. This helped me easily remove Lava Larva from metal surfaces, and to ward off Lava Lizards.

When the Sea Emperor showed up, however, all my countermeasures were useless. It emerged from a crack that was created right in the center of the Sea Dragon's ribcage. It almost looked like the Sea Emperor was born straight out of the Sea Dragon's torso, roaring the same roar as it did in my dream, and looking exactly the same.

I didn't have any time to ponder how I predicted what he'd look like in my dreams, but if my dream was more of a premonition, then I'd need a miracle to get rid of the giant monster that had emerged, surely to wreak havoc upon my home. Judging by its features, the Sea Emperor was the ideal can opener, and my seabase rooms, along with my submarines, were the cans. I needed the Colossus.

I sprinted towards the elevator that led down to the Colossus, with the control panel covered in dust, not being used in months. I swiped the dust away and put my hand up to the scanner, confirming my ID, despite there being zero other humans on this planet to try and break into the Colossus hangar, and stepped into the elevator and dropped down to where the Colossus sat like a giant metal knight, ever-vigilant, ready to defend its kingdom from any threat, no matter how huge.

I got into my Exosuit, and docked it inside of the Colossus, starting up all the systems and checking the power levels instinctively, with them all being an obvious 100%. I patched in Karen to assist with controlling the massive Colossus once again, hopefully for the last time ever. As the hidden doors opened and thousands of gallons of water poured in, I braced for a massive increase in pressure, and the built-in pressure compensators did a rusty job at reducing the pressure shock.

They hadn't so much as moved in months, so it was to be expected that some of the Colossus' systems wouldn't function at full capacity. If I had known more about the Sea Emperor, I would've known that I didn't need the Colossus at all. But I overreacted, and I paid the price for it.


	40. Death of the Dream, Part 2

When I stepped out of the Colossus hangar and saw the Sea Emperor emerging from the crack in the sea floor, I got flashbacks to my battle with the ferocious Sea Dragon Leviathan, who had destroyed my home and killed my ally, the enemy-turned-friendly Boneshark named Diablo, whose sacrifice I honored with a flag with a purple-blue Boneshark pattern on it, standing as a silent memorial to a fallen friend in the middle of the rubble of my base left over from the Sea Dragon's assault on my home. Scenes from my nightmare flashed before my eyes, with dead Stalkers on the sea floor in front of the Sea Emperor, my base torn to pieces and my Cyclops ripped in half, with an army of Lava Lizards viciously eviscerating anything that moved, and Lava Larvae feasting on the rotting carrion of my allies.

These visions instilled me a rage so intense that it drove me to enact a preemptive strike against the object of my hatred, not noticing that the Sea Emperor didn't seem interested in wanton destruction. As I charged in a blind fury at the leviathan before me, I didn't notice that he seemed to want to be left alone. Instead, I broke out into an all-out sprint, preparing to hit him as hard as I could. The blow staggered the Sea Emperor, and once I recovered, the visions in my head driving me to savagely beat him into the ground. Little did I know that what I was doing was actually the wrong thing to do.

All my anger had led me to attack a large creature based on its resemblance to the monster that had caused me so much pain and suffering. With each blow, I came closer and closer to making an enemy for life, one that I could've avoided making had my emotions not gotten the better of me.

My dream for peaceful cohabitation began to shatter like the bones of the Sea Emperor as I pummeled it in the face, and I finally stopped, realizing the ramifications of what I just did, knowing that this was the mysterious puppeteers' plan all along, to turn the planet's most powerful creature against me by tricking me into attacking him first, with the Sea Emperor lashing out in retaliation.

As I stumbled backwards, still reeling from the staggering realization that I had just made an enemy that would stop at nothing to get his revenge on me in return for beating him half to death, the Sea Emperor righted himself and swam off in a fury, but only after letting out the most rage-filled roar any creature has ever uttered in the entire history of man-kind, a mixture of pain, ferocity, and pure, unbridled rage and hatred.

I was now his life-long enemy, whether I liked it or not, and as I tried to justify my attack on him to myself by rationalizing that the masterminds had tricked me into doing it, I realized that I had no one to blame but myself. I let my emotions get the better of me. I chose to attack the Sea Emperor despite him not showing me any animosity whatsoever. I chose to attack him based on my fear and anger and visions telling me that he was just another, bigger, more dangerous Sea Dragon. It was my fault, and now, I'd have to kill him or be killed to get this to end.

I cried myself to sleep that night, having broken my vow to never needlessly harm an innocent animal, all over some stupid nightmare and a few judgments I made based on the Sea Emperor's appearance. There was a void in my stomach that no food could fill, a pit that was almost always filled with the pang of regret and shame and self-loathing, yet filled with nothing at all, as if I had lost a piece of my soul and the empty slot where it belonged was now filled with nothing but these negative emotions.

Whoever the masterminds behind my fall were, they had succeeded in their plan to ruin me. I hated myself more than I hated anything in my entire life. I felt like a nobody, worse than dirt, only worthy of the life I had so that I might suffer the consequences of my actions, and so that they may haunt me for the rest of my days.


	41. Tranquility

I knew I couldn't just sit there and wait for the Sea Emperor to attack me. I had to do something productive with my life, or at least what was left of it. I couldn't let him control my life. He wasn't going to keep me from exploring and gathering resources. I was going to take things as they come, continuing business as usual and if something happened, I'd adjust and take care of it. I hoped that the Sea Emperor had been scared off, or that it wasn't into attacking things, relying on its appearance to scare off predators, but I knew deep down that he would return.

Instead of cowering in fear of being attacked by him, I'd show him I wasn't afraid. I needed to gather resources to keep the base going, but more than anything, I needed to go to the open ocean and clear my head. I hopped in the USS Mayflower and parked it outside of the Creepvine Forest, embarking in the USS Explorer instead, and Stanley, Stella, and Steve fell in behind me, following me closely, and eventually, Shawn met up with us near where my observatory outpost was, a place where I went to go relax and clear my head of recent catastrophes. If it weren't for that outpost, with all its observatories and glass corridors, I probably would've lost my mind by now. Instead, the beautiful vistas of the ocean around me kept me at peace, something I needed now more than ever.

I sat down on a bench whose design I found in a wreck near the Grand Reef, along with a few different chairs, a starship captain's table, and a few unique planters, even one that was placed on the wall and had trailing vines dangling down, that I planted a small, glowing fern in. It was green, like a regular fern, but had a glowing crimson outline to its fronds, right on the edges so that it looked like a red-hot razor blade. It was a beautiful plant, and its dull glow made for nice ambient light when sitting in a dark modular room, with windows installed wherever they could be. The wall-mounted Glow-Ferns were mounted on the walls between each window.

The windows provided a view of the outside world that was rivaled by no other, showing off every aspect of the Creepvine Forest outside. There were schools of Boomerangs passing through to get to the Grassy Plateaus, where they went to feed on coral after eating most of the coral from the area of the Safe Shallows from whence they came, migrating to the Plateaus to eat the unique corals there, such as Green Table Coral, Coral Shells that grew on the base of the pillars around the biome, and more.

There were Hoverfish feeding on the ocean floor and hiding when a larger creature passed by, and on occasion, a Crabsquid would go by, sometimes pausing to munch on some Creepvine pieces or to forage for other debris on the ocean floor, such as a dead fish or some algae on a rock. Crabsquids were more active than Shuttlebugs, but weren't as efficient in their role of scavenging as the niche-filling Shuttlebugs were. Crabsquids were multi-purpose organisms, able to adapt to a variety of situations, while Shuttlebugs were built to be scavengers and scavengers only.

There were schools of other fish around as well, such as the occasional ball of Hoopfish as they created a massive low-density sphere in the water to allow them to move as a giant ball of confusing colors and patterns, with their electric blue and neon green colors, all swarming around each other, and dispersing when frightened in a dazzling display of unrivaled beauty. It was a truly breathtaking scene, and at night, things got even better. The Boomerangs and Hoopfish and Hoverfish would swim around excitedly, using the light from the glowing Creepvine seed clusters to highlight particles of food in the water, and the soft yellow glow illuminating their iridescent bodies as they darted past its light.

At that moment, when I was surrounded by a nighttime scene of fish feeding and mingling with other species, there was no place I'd rather have been than in that Creepvine Forest. Even returning back to my home- my REAL home- came second after this. Upon remembering that I wanted to go home, I started questioning that desire. Did I really want to return to civilization? I had everything I needed here.

Humans were a greedy, cruel species, that lived in perpetual strife and toiled endlessly with one another, whereas on Subnautica, everything interacted with each other naturally. Sure, I made a few alterations so that I could coexist on this planet, but in the grand scheme of things, the ecosystem carried on as usual. My alterations were as eco-friendly as they could be, and after all the previous shipwrecks polluted the planet's oceans, I had helped clean it up substantially. I stopped the Aurora's radiation leak, I went around picking up and safely disposing of metal salvage, I removed harmful contaminants from the environment, I reintroduced endangered species, such as the rare Eyeye, back into their natural habitats after captively breeding enough to return their numbers to safe numbers, hell, I even served as an exterminator when the vile parasites known as Bleeders began trying to infest each biome they came across.

They may be "natural" inhabitants of this planet, but I couldn't let them wipe out the area's sense of biodiversity by eliminating all the different species, so I intervened. After all, it would've led to nothing but the Bleeders taking over, running out of food, and dying off, and with the species they saw as food gone, there would've been no animal life left in the area for a long time.

A pointless waste of life.

Similar to what humanity was destined to become. I wanted no part of that. As long as I saw no way off this planet, I now considered Subnautica my home. The Stalkers, my family. My research, my legacy. And the sea, my fate.


	42. This War of Mine

Sancho. My faithful scout. He always kept me updated whether he knew it or not. He was instrumental to my success in this war of mine. I never thought that he would be put in danger. I should've known better. The second time Sancho's camera picked up the Sea Emperor, it was headed straight for him. The camera went to static as the Sea Emperor closed in. I went full speed to Sancho's last known location. What I found brought me to tears. He was on the ocean floor, bleeding out, still alive.

As I approached, Sancho let out a low moan. He was dying, the Sea Emperor having taken a large chunk out of his underbelly. I put my hand up to him, comforting him, as he lay in pain, dying from his wounds. Eventually, his breaths became labored, and eventually weakened as he passed away right in front of me. I wished that I would wake up and this would all be a terrible dream. Unfortunately, it was as real as everything that had happened to me since I landed on Subnautica. That was it. I lost TOO MUCH.

This was where I drew the line. Sancho would be the last thing I lost to this goddamn war! It was time to take the fight to the Precursors. I had smashed their communications antenna, and their signal must have been out there somewhere, and I was going to intercept it. Then, I could find out where they were hiding. The signal was traced back to the Lava Biome. My guess was that they were based in the Black Castle. It was time for an all-out assault.

I loaded up the Peacemaker and the Mayflower with sonic torpedoes, and the Explorer with vortex torpedoes. The reason I didn't have large vortex torpedoes was because a bigger vortex could create a miniature black hole. I'd rather not be sucked into a hole that would erase me from existence. I still had a war to win. For Sancho. And I wasn't going to give up.

I boosted Karen's processing power and synced her mainframe up to all the systems on all three of my submarines. All three were able to be controlled by Karen without any input on my part. I turned on the communications relay and adjusted the frequency to track down the Precursors, but I found something else. Something that would change everything I knew about this planet.

I found a very faint signal that was a recurring message from another group of survivors from the Aurora. The war would have to wait. "Aurora survivors to any nearby fellow survivors: we have finally found a way out of the wreck of the Aurora. The explosion ripped the hull open and alowed us to escape, but it took almost a week to navigate the internal wreckage." the message said. "We don't have any dry land or platform to keep us above water. Please come find us." This message had been playing for months, and I wasn't sure if anyone was even still alive, but it was worth a shot. I took the USS Mayflower to the site of the broadcast, which I had sent a response to telling them I was coming. I hadn't gotten a response back yet, but as I approached the crash site, the communications relay started beeping. "Karen. Play message." I said calmly.

"You're a little late," the man from the distress call said, "but better late than never. Hope you've got a vehicle of some sort, we have 2 other survivors here on our floating hunk of junk." As I approached the far side of the Aurora, I saw a floating piece of scrap metal with 3 people standing on it, waving their arms to get my attention. Their faces, instead of looking relieved, looked scared. They pointed in the water and yelled to me, trying to warn me about something. Just then, the keel proximity sensor started blaring and a moment later, it felt as though the Cyclops was lifted out of the water by the force of the impact from below. I switched on the keel camera and the eyes of death stared back at me.


	43. Ambush

The eyes that stared at me through the keel camera belonged to the Sea Emperor, as he ambushed the USS Mayflower from below, causing multiple minor breaches in the keel hull, suffering only a glancing blow as I quickly swung the Cyclops around to minimize impact damage. The STARS retaliated immediately, but the Emperor managed to dodge one of the two sonic torpedoes, and without the resonance created by the two sonic eruptions, the hypersonics of a single torpedo was less effective against a target like the Sea Emperor Leviathan. I managed to buy enough time to reach the survivors, but by the time we were ready to go, the Emperor had recovered, and was ready to pay me back for launching a torpedo at his face.

He caught the tail of the Mayflower in his jaws, shaking it back and forth, shaking us all around before the syntriprical force flung us out of his mouth. I quickly activated Karen's Seamoth autopilot feature and had her distract the Sea Emperor while we made our escape. Once we were clear of the Sea Emperor and Karen saw an opportunity to safely recall the Seamoth, I stopped the Cyclops to meet my new companions.

The man from the message was an African-American man named John, who wasn't exactly the sharpest knife in the block, but pretty strong, which contrasted well with my intelligence and speed. The next survivor was an older Asian man, who had a series of wounds on his right arm, so bad that they would render it useless without immediate medical attention. His name was Andrew, Andy for short, and he was a biologist like me, although he specialized in plant life instead of animals like I did. When we teamed up to do research, we bounced ideas off of each other, creating opportunities for great ideas.

The last survivor was an unconscious female, about my age, with long, red hair, whose name was Katelyn. She was a mechanic from aboard the Aurora, and was an accomplished swimming athlete. Her and I were always competing for who was faster underwater, and always trying to outdo each other in the machinery department. It was friendly competition, and occasionally, it turned to flirting, although being stranded on this planet wasn't an ideal condition to start a relationship. If we ever got off of this planet, maybe I would start a relationship with Katy, but right now, we were under too much stress.

I took all three of them back to my home base after introductions were done, and got Andy some medical attention. John, surprisingly, knew how to treat different wounds, having served as a national guard corpsman back on Earth. Unfortunately, he was sent on the Aurora voyage because no hospital wanted him after he was honorably discharged from service, but the Alterra Corporation "saw something special in him", according to John. I refrained from telling him the truth about Alterra, knowing that they all needed a while to recover and settle in before having their hopes of rescue dashed. For now, they needed to have hope.

The next day, after everyone was up, they met up and confronted me as a group, asking me about their chances of being rescued. "So, when can we expect to get rescued? We've already waited 4 months, how much longer are we gonna wait for rescue before we take matters into our own hands?" Andrew said. "Yeah, I mean, this planet is really beautiful, but I want to go home!" Katy exclaimed. "There's not gonna be a rescue, is there?" John said from the hallway where he leaned against the wall.

I took a deep breath, and told them everything. "Correct, John. There's no one coming. Alterra doesn't want us to get off of this planet. They crashed us here on purpose" I explained as I pulled up documents pertaining to the Alterra Atlas, the previous crash-landed ship, on the large display on my desk, flipping it around so that they all could see the evidence I had gathered against the Alterra Corporation. "Sonuva bitch!" John hissed under his breath. "So, what's the plan mister smart guy?" Katy inquired.

"Well, from what I can tell, the Aurora isn't an option for escaping this planet... At least, it WASN'T when I was on my own. Now that I have three other people helping me, it could be done. But first, we have a more pressing matter. The Precursors. Sentient, intelligent extraterrestrials that want to wipe us off the face of the planet, which I call Subnautica. They sent that huge creature, the Sea Emperor Leviathan, after me. Now that you're with me, it's after you now, too. Now, I think I know where the Precursors are, but attacking them head-on is risky. We need to hit them hard and fast, and show them no quarter." "Have you tried negotiating with them?" Andy asked. "If they're intelligent, maybe they can be reasoned with."

My response was firm and true: "I tried leaving them alone, I tried staying away from them, I tried not fighting back, and they all ended the same way: they kept trying to kill me. They're not going to stop. Trust me, I've tried. We have to end this once and for all. Otherwise, we're never leaving this planet."


	44. The Plan

The plan seemed simple at first. John would lead an all-out siege against the Precursors while Katy and I would travel to the Aurora and begin fixing it, hopefully restoring its ability to fly before John was forced to retreat. Andrew would help John from home base, while keeping it safe. Then, hopefully, we would be able to escape and come back with an army of some sort, or at least expose Alterra for what they really were- murderers, liars, and criminals.

However, I knew how monumentally difficult it would be to pull this off, especially since the Precursors had an entire army at their command, led by a massive leviathan. On top of all that, we weren't even sure if the Precursors were based in the Black Castle, since the last time I "tracked them down", I found an antenna bouncing their control signal off of it to mislead me. Who knows, they could be trying to trick me again for all I knew, but we had to try.

To prepare for the assault, we manufactured a small army of modified constructor bots, with various amounts of armor, with the light bots having minor titanium alloy plating and having two stun guns, one on each arm. They were faster but more fragile, and their older brother, the medium bot, had durable, moderately thick titanium plating, and 2 medium stun guns on one arm, with a sonic micro-missile pod on the other. The heavy bot was heavily armored with plasteel plating, but was very slow, and had a sonic torpedo pod mounted on each shoulder, allowing it to rain down non-lethal fire against any target. It also had 2 heavy stun guns on each arm.

The real challenge was laying siege to an enemy fortress with non-lethal weapons. Vortex torpedoes were the most powerful weapon I could use without having to worry about killing any of the innocent creatures under the Precursors' control. Unfortunately, the Precursors' army had no such grievances against using lethal force on us. We weren't exactly on an equal playing field with these creatures. It was like Batman fighting an army of monsters but refusing to seriously injure them. It was far from a fair fight.

If we screwed up one part of the plan, the whole thing could've fallen apart. We had to perform this perfectly, and we created multiple contingency plans for each situation and for each step. We were taking no chances, and planned for as many situations as we could predict. However, there was one situation we couldn't find a solution to: The inability to fix the Aurora. There was no way around this one. It was the spanner in the works, the fly in the ointment... The X-factor. The whole plan depended on the Aurora's condition.

However, the Aurora was fixable the last time Katy saw it, so the chances of it being FUBAR were slim. All the necessary pieces to restoring the Aurora's drive core, hull, and central computer were all there or obtainable, as long as nothing bad had happened since we left it. Still, the entire plan revolved around our ability to fix the Aurora. Otherwise, it would take years to build another ship capable of space travel, years we didn't have. If it was unable to be repaired, well... It would definitely be a problem.


	45. The Problem

Our worst nightmare was that the Aurora would be unfixable. That we wouldn't be able to repair it to the point where we could use it to escape the planet Subnautica. It was the only part of our plan that posed a serious problem should it not pan out the way we wanted. Katelyn, being a mechanic, determined that based on the Aurora's last known condition, it was fixable. What she didn't count on, what NONE of us counted on, was the intelligence of our adversaries.

The Precursors were smart enough to manipulate the Sea Emperor into attacking us, but we didn't expect the Sea Emperor himself to be smart enough to ruin our plans. He had ripped the Aurora apart, scattering its parts all over the surrounding ocean, tearing some of the more important parts in half and beyond, making sure that none of the key components were usable ever again. We had a serious problem, and we had to abort the mission to get home. Operation Exodus would have to wait. Indefinitely.

The problem wasn't that we wouldn't be able to rebuild the Aurora over time, but that the Sea Emperor would oppose our efforts at every turn. As far as he was concerned, we were his enemies, and everything we did, we did to destroy him. That's what the Precursors had tricked him into thinking. It was partially my fault as well, tricking me into attacking him unprovoked, turning a curious creature into an aggravated monster, an enemy for life. He took Sancho from me, he ruined my chances of getting home, now I was done playing nice. It was time to become the monster that the Sea Emperor already thought I was. Why not? After all, if he already thought I was a monster, why not BE the monster? It wasn't going to change anything.

Then again, neither would killing him. It wasn't going to fix the Aurora. Johns wanted revenge, while Andy wanted to focus on alternate solutions to our problem. Katy was in the middle, wanting to pay back the Emperor for what he did, while also wanting to figure out an alternate means of space travel.

I was a bit less torn, wanting to take revenge on the Emperor for destroying our one hope of returning to our home, and I was pretty determined to do so. But Katy convinced me otherwise. "C'mon, Matt. You shouldn't do this. There's no point!" she argued. "It'll stop that bastard from wiping us all out." I said sternly. "If you do this, you're no better than him." she said with her green, pleading eyes. I hesitated, but her beautiful eyes won me over in the end. "Fine... I'll leave him alone..." "Thank you." she said sincerely. "You're doing the right thing." She then kissed me on the cheek and ran off to join Andrew to try and come up with a way off this planet.

If not for Katy, I probably would've done something I would've regretted, but she was definitely a good influence on me. I had always saw myself as morally righteous, but with blood on my hands, I had been corrupted. It took an angel, Katy, to bring me back from damnation for the things I had done to survive. I was falling in love with her. She was kind, sympathetic, uncompromising, strong-willed, funny, and it helped that she was drop-dead gorgeous! Right now, we didn't have time to start a serious relationship, but I was convinced she was the one for me. For all the good it did us now, trapped on this watery planet indefinitely.

After a week of brainstorming ideas, we reached the horrifying conclusion that there was no other way off this planet. Rebuilding the Aurora was out of the question, and building another space travel-capable vessel would take a long time, and the Sea Emperor would hamper our progress.

We were doomed to live out the rest of our days on Subnautica. And as far as Andy and I were concerned, there was no plan to escape anymore. There was only the plan to survive. I don't remember surviving being as difficult as it was once the Aurora was gone. It was a serious struggle, one for the right to live.


	46. The Solution

A few days after Katy and I had given in to our feelings for each other, we decided as a group that we needed a serious, long-term plan for survival. We all met as a group and came up with a solution to the Precursor problem: we were going to get rid of them- permanently. We detected that the main reason the Sea Emperor was so angry with us was due to a low-intensity signal that increased aggravation levels in the Emperor's brain. If we could get rid of the source of the signal, then perhaps we could persuade the Emperor to leave us alone! It was a bit of a stretch, but it was worth a shot.

Even Katy agreed with the plan, rationalizing that the Precursors were not considered innocent creatures, since they took deliberate steps to destroy us by disrupting the entire ecosystem. They had unleashed predators into the open ocean that were not supposed to be there. They were eco-terrorists, thinking themselves entitled to the right to manipulate the planet's life forms to their benefit. It was time to end their reign of terror.

John was anxious to use the battlebots that were never used since we cancelled the siege on the Black Castle. He would lead them into battle, armed with more dangerous weaponry this time, with the intent of destroying the Precursors once and for all. Preliminary scans of the Black Castle and the surrounding area revealed large numbers of Spine Eels patrolling the area, but tending to stay closer to their home biome, the Lost River. They'd be the first creatures we neutralized on our way to the Castle, since the Lost River was where our base of operations was located.

The second wave would be more difficult, being a metaphorical minefield of floating rocks, with Lava Larvae lying dormant on the outside of them, and occasionally having a Lava Lizard burrowed in the middle of the bigger boulders, waiting to sense movement outside and strike like lightning. We had no idea what lie past the boulder-field, since none of our drones ever made it past the field of rocks. The plan was to send out a few Seamoths to knock out the Spine Eels, then use the USS Peacemaker to smash a hole in the rock field, allowing the rest of our forces to surround the Black Castle. From there, there would most likely be an all-out last-ditch effort to beat us back.

If we withstood their attack, well... We would improvise. As long as there was no third leviathan waiting within the Black Castle to rip us apart, we stood a chance. Unfortunately, we underestimated the Precursors themselves. We thought they were only mentally powerful. We had no idea they were a force to be reckoned with physically as well.


	47. Tyrant's Fall

Assaulting the Precursors on their home turf was a bad enough idea WITHOUT knowing that they were equally as dangerous as their army of monstrous creatures. The Precursors themselves resembled highly evolved Warpers, with a similar body shape and head, but with spindly arms that had fingers for grasping instead of claws, although their hands weren't exactly like human hands. They had an opposable thumb like humans did, but they also had one on the other end of their hand as well, where the little finger should've been on a human.

They could speak their own mysterious language fluently, and their craniums, like the rest of their bodies, were translucent, with a dim, pulsating, light blue brain inside, which lit up when it became more active, visually showing the brain's synapses and nerve endings firing throughout its body.

They would've been breath-taking metaphorically if they weren't breath-taking literally, trying to kill us to rid their planet of our influence. Katy, John, Andy and I had gotten past the Spine Eel guards just like we planned, and were charging through the boulder-field using the massive USS Peacemaker when the Black Castle the Precursors were housed in began to glow blood-red, pulsing to orange occasionally, and as we drew closer, smashing through floating rocks like they were specks of dust, the Black Castle let out a huge red pulse that emanated in all directions, resembling an expanding dome, crackling with orange-red energy as it passed through the Peacemaker, the Mayflower, and all the other vehicles.

Immediately following the pulse, every single system onboard all of our vehicles began crashing, and we lost power completely within 30 seconds. "They hit us with a bio-organic electromagnetic pulse of some sort- a bio-EMP!" Andrew yelled from the engine room of the Peacemaker. "It's going to take me some time to get this running again!" "Here, I'll help you. I've fixed a few fried vehicles before." Katy offered. "Good. John and I will get out there and use whatever tools we can to hold off the Precursors' army while you restore power to our equipment. Please hurry, though. I'm not sure how long we can hold the line without our vehicles." I said.

"Good news. The battle-bots were off when the pulse went off. It seemed to have protected them from the electro-thingy." John reported. "They're ready for battle." "Well then. Let's not keep them waiting." We exited the Peacemaker, and I pulled out my propulsion cannon, which I had modified to manipulate gravity to cause a seismic last that could be directed at a target, knocking it unconscious.

Its strength could be adjusted for bigger or smaller creatures to avoid casualties, but I kept it on medium to avoid having to switch back and forth to avoid causing unnecessary pain. After Lava Larvae almost succeeded in sinking the USS Mayflower on one of my patrols, swarming it en masse until I couldn't even see out the window, they deserved a little payback. Their bruises would heal. I widened the cone of effect for the first few blasts, hoping to slow the army down, and take down a few of the creatures in the process.

I waited with my shoulder-mounted floodlight on full intensity, turning left and right to cut a swath through the curtain of darkness separating me from my enemies with my cone of light, but saw nothing out in the blackness. It was eerily quiet, and there was no sign of any of the creatures hiding amongst the boulders around us. They had all abandoned their posts. Something big was coming.

The Sea Emperor announced its arrival with a massive, deafening, spine-tingling roar that was so loud it almost rattled my teeth out of my mouth, and it ascended from below to confront us. As it rose up and righted itself, it let out the most horrifying roar anybody has ever heard. "RrrroOOOOOAAAAAAAARRRrrrrr-r-r-r-r-r-r-r!" it went as its battle cry tapered off into a growl, which transitioned over to the Emperor's usual stuttering snarl. It was time for battle. "Let he who dies," I prayed, "die well." I didn't want to have to fire the first shot, but considering the Emperor's first "shot" could kill all of us in a single go, I chose a preemptive strike, blasting the Sea Emperor in the face at full intensity with a medium cone of effect.

I continued to blast at various body parts, using the stasis rifle to halt attacks with his scythe-like arms, while blasting away at his "weak spots", although they weren't very "weak" at all. His eyes were a good target, since it kept him disoriented, and the back of his head being hit stunned him by jolting his brain around, rattling it around his cranium like whiplash. It was a rare target, but occasionally, a battlebot would get his attention long enough for me to line up a good shot at the back of his head, and keeping him stunned for a while gave Andy and Katy time to fix the subs.

Just as I started running low on batteries and our battlebot army began to dwindle, I saw a large sonic torpedo whiz by my head, and the world seemed to go in slow-motion for a second. I could read the spray-painted message on the torpedo, saying "EAT IT", with another saying "EMPEROR OR BUST". Katy's sense of humor seemed to find its way into everything; even our torpedoes had funny messages on them!

Apparently, Katy and Andy had gotten the STARS system back online, and immediately started retaliating against the monstrous leviathan before us. Beaten and weary from battle, the Sea Emperor retreated one last time, letting out a somber cry of defeat, knowing he had been bested as the sonic torpedoes knocked him silly. Now, there was only one thing left to do. But boy, was it going to be a bitch and a half.


	48. One Final Effort

Katy and Andy had gotten our army mobile again after the Precursors' bio-EMP, but it still didn't guarantee us the win. The Precursor army was a strong one, and once the Precursors themselves joined the fight, it became an uphill battle for us. Their mysterious, energy-based abilities made them formidable opponents that were not to be underestimated. They were able to warp more often than Warpers, and their energy spheres took less time to fire. Their were 7 that we could see, and every one of them refused to go down. They used their portals to redirect our projectiles back at us, and opened up portals in front of our bots, waiting until one was halfway inside the portal before closing it, cutting the bot in half. Our forces continued to dwindle, while the Precursors took heavy losses and merely replaced each fallen minion with two more. Every time a Precursor was about to go down,

they'd teleport away, then summon a bunch of energy that healed their wounds rapidly. What we needed was a turning point. A turn-around. We needed to tilt the scales in our favor. "Concentrate our attacks on one of the Precursors. Keep him stunned." I said. "Which one?" Katy inquired. "This one." I said as I shot one with a tracking dart from my propulsion cannon. The Precursor sensed the pressure change as the dart approached, but his portal narrowly missed catching the dart, and it stuck into the Precursor's forehead, giving off a beacon that pinged constantly on our HUDs."Let him have it." I commanded. "Heal from this, bitch." Katy muttered as she launched all the USS Explorer's sonic torpedoes towards the Precursor. I blasted him with a full-intensity sonic wave from my sonic cannon, stunning him so that the torpedoes could find their marks without interference, and the resonating

sundwaves from all 4 torpedoes literally ripped him apart. All the Precursors turned to the site of impact, and,seeing their fallen brother, were horrified when they realized that they were outmatched.

Just like that, the Precursors disappeared in the blink of an eye, and their energy signature indicated that they were headed for the Lost River biome, where our forward operating base was located. "They're trying to attack our base!" John exclaimed. "C'mon, guys! Fall back!" I ordered. We returned at full speed to our base, hoping to fight the remaining Precursors on our own turf, but there was no sign of them near our base. Instead, they were over near the massive skeleton of the extinct leviathan that made up the centerpiece of the biome. "Matt... You're not going to like these readings." Andy said with a wince. "That's... That's impossible!" I cried, bewildered. "They're calling forth another one!" "Another what?!" Katy asked, exasperated. "I... I don't know." I said, mortified. The ground began to shake as the skeleton of the mysterious creature fell into a massive crevice that

was torn open beneath it, and a guttural growl poured forth from the mighty void, growing into roar that rivalled that of Godzilla, just like the size of the creature it came from, as we soon found out. The creature was absolutely huge, being an estimated six THOUSAND feet long, and our Cyclops was about as big around as its eye. We were screwed. "I have good news, and bad news." I said somberly over the comms. "The good news is, it's so big, it doesn't notice us yet. The bad news is, IT'S SO BIG IT DOESN'T EVEN NOTICE US YET!" I screamed as I totally lost my cool. "Calm down! Get a hold of yourself!" Katy commanded. "Think with that big brain of yours. How can we take this thing down?" "We... We'd need, uh, a-a-a w-w-weapon of mass destruction. Some sort of nuke might do it. W-w-we could contain the blast if we walled in the area with terraformers. The walls would have to be really

thick though, and Karen's auto-pilot systems were damaged, so the only source of nuclear power sufficient to take down this monster would have to be piloted manually." "Wait, one of our vehicles has a

nuclear reactor?" Katy asked. "Yes... The Peacemaker does. It's expirimental, not meant for field use, but I have the necessary nuclear rods to power it. The colission with that... thing... should be enough to set it off. It's quite unstable as it is." "Alright... Well... Who's gonna drive it?" John asked as he addressed the elephant in the room. "We'll draw straws." I said. "We have straws?" Andy asked. I pulled out 4 random straws out of the few dozen that I had recovered from the cafeteria of the Aurora, and jumbled them all up. They were all different lengths, and I let John go first. He drew a fairly long one, and Andy drew next. He got the longest of the four. Katy was next, and I didn't know how long the remaining two were. She pulled it out and got one that was shorter than John's. I was pouring buckets of sweat as I opened up my hands to compare my straw to Katelyn's. We held

them up next to each other, and Katy began sobbing. I had drawn the shortest straw. It was my time. After all I had done, after all I had endured, it was finally time to atone for my actions, to rest one last time. I kissed Katy one last time, apassionate and long kiss that I would treasure until my final moments, then shook hands with John and Andy, both of them trying hard not to cry. As I said my fairwells and climbed into the Peacemaker's cockpit, Karen came online to say goodbye to her captain one last time. "It's been an honor, sir. You're the bravest human I've ever known in my 7 years of service." "The pleasure's all mine, Karen." I said with a weak smile. I shed no tears, knowing that what I did, I did to insure that my friends would survive to escape this planet and go home. I recalled an excerpt from a classic Charles Dickens novel as I charged forwards to my end; "It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way..." I turned on the comms one last time. 10 seconds to impact. 9. 8. 7. 6. "I love you, Katelyn." 5. 4. 3. 2. 1. 0.

EPILOGUE: My name is Matthew Britton. If you're reading this, that means I'm probably dead. This is the truth behind the Alterra Science Corporation." That was the opening line to the prologue of his journal. As his lover, it's my responsibility to make sure his voice is heard. "John, please pull up the auto-pilot's last known status aboard the USS Peacemaker. I wanna know what I could have done." "Sure thing, Katy. Listen, I'm sorry. I miss him too, but we have to move on eventually. Hopefully this'll help you move on." John said. The funny thing is, the system registered something peculiar right at the end, a few seconds before impact. It detected that the throttle had been locked into place at full speed ahead, and that the escape pod had launched. There was still hope. The onboard black box recorded Matt saying something prior to impact. "Wait a minute..." he muttered to himself. "What if I- YES!" Then the computer registered the life pod launching. I had to know. I took the USS Explorer, Matt's old Seamoth, down to the barrier we had created to contain the Peacemaker's nuclear blast, and saw that a small hole had been dug in the wall. Perhaps I wouldn't need to tell Matt's story for him after all...

THE END... FOR NOW!


End file.
